Andy Worthington's Blog, page 94

Video: Charlotte Church’s Inspirational Anti-Austerity Speech on June 20

Last Saturday, the new Tory government was confronted by a massive anti-austerity protest, when 250,000 people marched through central London to express their dissatisfaction and disgust with the current political situation — one in which a party that gained the support of just 24.4% of the electorate, and 36.1% of those who voted, nevertheless secured 50.9% of the seats, and is committed to more of the ruinous policies implemented over the last five years — more privatisation of essential public services, including the NHS and our schools, more persecution of the poor, the unemployed and the disabled, and more enriching of the already rich, widening the chasm between the rich and poor with every day that passes.

I wrote about the anti-austerity march here and here, and my photos from the day are on Flickr here, and I hope that another opportunity for people to express their rage in significant numbers will be organised in the not too distant future. We need to meet up regularly, to reassure ourselves that we are many, and they are few, and to find ways in which we can work towards the creation of a better world.

At the end of the march last Saturday, protestors filled Parliament Square, where a succession of speakers addressed the crowd, including Labour leadership contender (and We Stand With Shaker supporter) Jeremy Corbyn, Owen Jones, Mark Steel, Caroline Lucas and Russell Brand. Also speaking was Charlotte Church, the Welsh singer-songwriter, actress and television presenter, who was a child star as a classical singer, and who delivered a powerful speech against austerity and in defense of public services. I’m posting the video of her speech below, as well as a transcript of it from her website:

What particularly impressed me was not only Charlotte’s words, but how rare it is these days for a major mainstream celebrity to engage in political protest, even though the times we live in demand it from anyone with a conscience and an ability to see beyond the lies and distortions used to prop up an increasingly unequal society, which, moreover, is rigged to enrich the already rich at the expense of the young and the poor.

I hope you find Charlotte’s speech as engaging as the crowd in Parliament Square did eight days ago, and as I did when I saw the video, having missed the speeches on the day. As Charlotte said, “Ultimately the government’s endgame isn’t cutbacks to pay off debt. What they want to do is completely restructure our economy, shrivelling the public sector and selling our democracy to private companies.” May the struggle continue!

The text of Charlotte Church’s speech to the huge anti-austerity march in London, June 20, 2015

It’s so heartening to see so many people here. I’m not going to take up much of your time. But I do want to talk to two specific groups today. The first is those economists, academics, journalists, lawyers, public figures, celebrities, artists, who consider themselves progressive. We need to stop genre-defining our politics, and harking back to old ideologies, and start talking about the future of government, the future of democracy, our children’s future; how we can be innovative in our thinking, how we can captivate the attention of the disengaged demographics, and how we can re-engage those at the most disaffected desperate fringes of society who were convinced to vote for a new-age fascist party by “Chicken Licken” trickery from an ale-swilling, pinstripe, Enoch Powell.

One of the main reasons so many young people are turning towards the agendas of consumerist capitalism, is that its advocates have embraced the language of positivity even whilst championing the most radical deconstruction of society. David Cameron’s neo-liberal vernacular is aspirational, it rewards entrepreneurship, there’s a romanticism about it. When I was a kid that romance was always a lefty thing. This model of capitalism is built on aspiration and driven by innovation. But my God, is it destructive. On the flip side of laissez-faire economics is the big lie, that this country needs tough management, harsh decision making, austerity.

What this country needs is economic stimulation. Most economists around the world would say the same. We need to get the blood pumping, and that cannot be achieved by stringing tourniquets around the limbs of social welfare. If a mother cannot afford to feed both her children does she choose one to feed and leave the other to starve? Of course she doesn’t. She will go without until those children are able to feed themselves. That is civilised, and moral. The fact remains that whilst those whose lives depend on the benefits they receive, those less fortunate people, that the Daily Mail would call scroungers, whilst they have their welfare severed, the government will sell off its stake, our stake in Royal Bank of Scotland at a scandalous rate so that their buddies in big business can turn over millions in profit from it within a matter of hours. They will sell off our schools and our hospitals. And once it’s done it will be very difficult to reverse.

One aspect of this that really gets under my skin is that it’s all wrapped up in a proud-to-be-British package. I’m proud to be British because of our National Health Service, the welfare system, and David Bowie, not ’cause of the Union Jack! Nationalism has worked wonders for the Scots because it’s galvanised them against the Westminster elite. But rarely does pure nationalism have a positive effect, and more often than not it serves to veil racism. I’m not saying don’t be proud, I’m saying be proud for the right reasons.

We need to win back these young minds and save ourselves from decades of Yuppie rule. And the way we do that is with fresh ideas, positive messages, new theories, engaging art, and more public figures sticking their heads above the parapet.

The second group I want to talk to today is those who will be affected by austerity; austerity, that Cameron says should be a “permanent” aspect of British economics. Every single person in the country will be affected by austerity. Public services are needed by everybody. We all contribute, whether we can monetarily or not. Because contribution is not solely a fiscal matter, it is cultural, community-based, academic; it is friendship, it is love. If you are a disabled person, unable to work, whose benefits are in danger of being cut, don’t you dare think that you don’t contribute. Your existence brightens the lives of other people every single day, and that is worth so much more than the ability to pay tax. If you feel ashamed that you have to use a food bank because this government would rather see you starve than put a note in your pocket, walk tall, you have the moral high ground.

There is only one way to fight the onslaught of crusading austerity, and that is to come together in unity. I want to urge everyone: go out into your communities and meet your neighbours. Find out what they think and try to see things from their point of view. If you can afford to offer help to those in society who need it, just do it. Don’t un-friend all those on Facebook who post things that you disagree with; challenge them, engage them in debate, but kindly and with reason on your side. You never know, you might just change someone’s opinion. And more than anything we need to keep on pressuring the establishment into hearing our voice. Today has been fantastic but it is only the beginning.

Ultimately the government’s endgame isn’t cutbacks to pay off debt. What they want to do is completely restructure our economy, shrivelling the public sector and selling our democracy to private companies, in the form of TTIP, academies, G4S-controlled prisons. It is an ideological plan that is irreversible. Let us remember that the NHS was born at a time when the national debt-to-GDP ratio was significantly larger than what it is now.

Let’s show the government that we are not afraid of national debt and we will not allow our public services to be attacked. Because everybody needs them, whether you are black, asian, white, homosexual , bisexual, transgender, questioning, disabled, able-bodied, autistic, well-educated, a drop-out, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, an immigrant, a small business owner, a single mother, a single father, a childless couple, a child without parents, a nuclear family, a police officer, a politician, a journalist, a CEO, unemployed, a teacher, a nurse, a brain surgeon, a student, a convict, a pensioner, an under-18, whether you claim benefits, whether you pay taxes, we all need a strong public sector. And if we keep on keeping on they will not be able to ignore us. We will not be silenced.

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.

Skeletal, 75-Pound Guantánamo Hunger Striker Tariq Ba Odah Seeks Release; Medical Experts Fear For His Life

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.

For the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, introduced by the United Nations in 1997 to mark the entry into force of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on June 26, 1987, a vivid reminder of the horrors of Guantánamo emerged the day before, when lawyers for Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemeni prisoner identified by the US authorities as Tarek Baada, sought “a court order granting his habeas petition and compelling the government to facilitate [his] immediate release” because of fears that, otherwise, he will die at the prison. The submission to the court is here.

Tariq, who was picked up in Pakistan by the local authorities at the end of 2001 and turned over to the US military, arrived at Guantánamo shortly after the prison opened in 2002, when he was 23 years old. He is now 36, and he is still held despite being approved for release in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009. He is one of 30 men, all Yemenis, who were placed in a category invented by the task force — “conditional detention,” which was made dependant on perceptions of the security situation in his home country improving, although it was never made clear who would make that decision, or how it would come about.

However, since President Obama began finding new homes in third countries for Yemenis approved for release last November, the only obstacle to his release now is the difficulty of finding a country to accept him, as well as countries prepared to offer new homes to the 29 other Yemenis in “conditional detention,” and 13 other Yemenis approved for release by the task force — or approved for release in the last year and a half by Periodic Review Boards — but still held. Since last November, 18 Yemenis have been released from Guantánamo to third countries.

In Tariq’s case, however, the need to find a third country to accept him — or for the US to put pressure on Saudi Arabia, where his family lives, to take him in — has become urgent. He is one of a handful of hunger strikers at Guantánamo who have been on a hunger strike for eight years — since 2007 — and he is, to put it bluntly, at risk of death. He is represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, and in a press release on Thursday CCR explained that, “According to information disclosed by the government, Mr. Ba Odah weighs only approximately 75 lbs. — 56 percent of his ideal body weight — a weight that experts say puts him ‘on the precipice of death.'”

His attorney, Omar Farah, said, “I visited Tariq on April 21, and he was nearly unrecognizable to me. He is now enduring more suffering at Guantánamo than he has ever known. All the bones in his midsection are visible through his skin, his jawline and teeth protrude, and he says he is losing sensation in his hands and feet and his memory is fading. Despite having been cleared for release more than five years ago and despite his shocking condition, he is still being held in solitary confinement in Guantánamo’s Camp 5 facing irreversible harm and possibly death.”

In the court submission, Omar Farah stated, “During meetings with counsel in March and April of this year, Mr. Ba Odah was so dramatically underweight as to be essentially unrecognizable, even by standards of his usual frailty … In the absence of a photograph, counsel can only compare Mr. Ba Odah’s appearance to iconic and horrifying photographs of Holocaust survivors.” Omar Farah reported that Tariq said, “My life is not like it was; this is the hardest time I have ever had.”

In the submission to the District Court in Washington D.C., Tariq’s lawyers sought to revive his habeas corpus petition. Back in January 2009, as they explained, “counsel filed an unopposed motion to stay his petition because Mr. Ba Odah often declined or was physically unable to attend attorney-client meetings,” and in March 2014 Tariq formally withdrew his habeas petition. As the lawyers stated, “His health dictated that he elect to withdraw; in his already weakened state, Mr. Ba Odah could not effectively participate in mounting a defense to the government’s allegations against him.”

Tariq’s lawyers also spelled out his predicament in stark terms: “As the government reported during counsel’s last trip to Guantánamo, Mr. Ba Odah’s weight has dropped to an alarming 74.5 pounds … Mr. Ba Odah is visibly suffering from the devastating effects of severe malnutrition and is at serious risk of permanent physical and neurological impairment and death. He seeks habeas relief from this Court because the laws of war no longer authorize his continued detention under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (‘AUMF’). This Court is thus empowered and, under the circumstances here, obligated to provide that relief.”

The lawyers added, “As the Supreme Court explained in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004), the government’s asserted authority to indefinitely detain Mr. Ba Odah, pursuant to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, is expressly constrained by the laws of war. The laws of war are incorporated into binding domestic law set forth in U.S. Army Regulation 190-8, which delineates categories of prisoners who are seriously ill, such as Mr. Ba Odah, and provides for their direct humanitarian release and repatriation.”

As CCR also explained, “Medical experts in today’s filing confirm the military’s force-feeding regimen is failing to keep him alive.”

Three medical experts submitted declarations in Tariq’s case, and in every case their analysis was deeply alarming.

Dr. Jess Ghannam, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Global Health Sciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said, “A weight of 75 pounds for an adult male is a phenomenon rarely, if ever encountered by the medical profession. It is a level of physical deterioration typically seen in a late-stage cancer or AIDS patient, as it is usually indicative that someone is on the precipice of death due to severe malnutrition, organ failure, and systemic collapse.”

Dr. Mohammed Rami Bailony, Medical Director of Enara Health Group, P.C.,added, “His body is in such a fragile state owing to his depleted caloric absorption and compromised vital organs, that any additional stress on the body, from an infection, fever, or serious injury, could quite simply overwhelm his systemic response causing death in a period of days.”

The third expert, Dr. Sondra S. Crosby, Director and Co-Founder of the Immigration and Refugee Health Program at the Boston Medical Center and Director of the Forensic Medical Evaluation Group at Boston University School of Medicine, stated, “Put simply, Mr. Ba Odah’s survival and rehabilitation are out of his hands. He most likely cannot recover by simply abandoning his hunger strike and introducing solid food in his diet.”

As his lawyers described it in their submission: “Mr. Ba Odah is on a prolonged hunger strike to peacefully protest his over thirteen years of indefinite detention without charge. As of this filing, he has not voluntarily eaten food in eight years and four months. Despite being force fed, Mr. Ba Odah is suffering from an array of dangerous symptoms attributable to severe malnutrition. At this sensitive stage, however, where his body appears unable to properly absorb calories or micronutrients, his further deterioration cannot likely be remediated by increasing the volume of commercial liquid formula the government feeds him through his nose — though Mr. Ba Odah reports the government has already attempted that approach. Even ingesting solid food now presents a mortal risk to Mr. Ba Odah.”

His lawyers also stated: “Mr. Ba Odah believes his protest has provoked a punitive backlash from the military, designed to get him to abandon his hunger strike. This is manifested by, among other abuses and indignities, violent cell-extractions, force-feeding sessions that leave him wet with his own vomit, and unremitting confinement in solitary conditions in Guantánamo’s Camp 5, where now he says he does not see anyone and he does not see the sun. This is to say nothing of his psychological torment: Mr. Ba Odah is plagued by uncertainty about his fate. After over thirteen years of indefinite detention, Mr. Ba Odah fears he may never leave Guantánamo though he has never been charged and despite being approved for release by the very government that continues to imprison him.”

They added: “Mr. Ba Odah does not wish to die; he wishes to be reunited with his family in Saudi Arabia or to be freed to any other safe country where he can begin to recover … At the same time, he feels compelled by the injustice he is enduring at Guantánamo to continue his hunger strike, the only peaceful way available for him to protest with self-control and with dignity. If he were repatriated to Saudi Arabia or resettled elsewhere, he would end his hunger strike and welcome rehabilitative care … He seeks peace and a return home: ‘There is nothing else I want. There is nothing better that I care about.'”

Urging immediate action, Omar Farah said, “Tariq must be released immediately. The Obama administration has seen prisoners die at Guantánamo on its watch before. If it had foreseen those deaths, would it have done anything differently? For the sake of Tariq — who is now 75 pounds and in immense suffering — and for justice, I hope the answer is yes.”

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we can only echo Omar Farah’s words.

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.

Six Months After the CIA Torture Report, We’re Still Waiting for Accountability

I’m sure many of us remember where we were on December 9, 2014, when, two years after it was completed, the 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s five-year, 6,700-page, $40m report into the CIA’s post-/11 torture report was released, which I wrote about here and here.

It was a momentous occasion, for which Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and everyone who worked with her to compile the report and and to publish it (or its executive summary, at least), deserve profound thanks. In dark times, in which the US system of checks and balances has gone awry, this was a bright light in the darkness. It also caused British commentators like myself to reflect on the fact that it was something that would never happen in the UK.

That said, however, the widespread sense of horror that greeted the publication of the executive summary, with its profoundly disturbing details that were unknown before — like the “rectal feeding” of prisoners for example — has not, in the six months since, led to firm action to hold accountable those who authorized and implemented the program, which is, of course, unacceptable. As I wrote at the time in my article for Al-Jazeera:

In the days and weeks to come, there will be concerted efforts by the CIA and by former Bush administration officials to defend their actions, but the report makes clear that any kind of defense is untenable. Crimes were committed, authorized at the highest level of the US government, and, although Obama came into office in 2009 expressing “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards”, that is not acceptable.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report … must be the trigger not just for an airing of apologies, but for those who instigated and authorized the torture program to be held accountable — up to and including President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

The full executive summary of the torture report is posted below, if anyone has not yet seen it:

Following the publication of the torture report, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and Human Rights Watch sent a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder requesting him to appoint a Special Prosecutor for Torture. In the letter, dated December 22, 2014, the two organizations urged him “to conduct a full investigation of violations of federal criminal laws relating to the rendition, detention, and interrogation (‘RDI’) of prisoners held or questioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) since the September 11, 2001 attacks. While the Department of Justice has conducted an investigation into some aspects of this matter already [under John Durham in 2009], the recently released summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (‘SSCI’) Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program (‘Senate torture report’) includes significant new information relating to the commission of serious federal crimes, including torture, homicide, conspiracy, and sexual assault. In light of the disclosure of this information, we ask that you ensure the investigation’s independence, and the appearance of independence, by appointing a special prosecutor; provide the prosecutor with files from the investigation completed by John Durham and his investigators, as well as the full 6,700-page version of the Senate torture report; and ask the prosecutor to conduct a comprehensive criminal investigation of the conduct described in the report, including all acts authorizing or ordering that conduct.”

Eric Holder left office shortly afterwards, to be replaced by Loretta Lynch, who has not made accountability for torture a priority in her new job.

Tomorrow, however (June 26), it is the annual International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, introduced by the United Nations in 1997 to mark the entry into force of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on June 26, 1987, when all decent people will be remembering the victims of torture, calling for an end to its use, and also calling for accountability for those who have authorized and implemented its use.

To mark the occasion, 100 rights organizations around the world have submitted a statement to the UN Human Rights Council to “demand that the United States take measures to meet the full spectrum of its obligations under international law to ensure accountability, transparency, reparations and non-repetition, including declassification of the full Senate report on the CIA detention program, independent comprehensive criminal investigation, and the issuing of apologies and compensation to victims of enforced disappearance, torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” As they note, “Continued impunity is a dark chapter in the history of the United States that threatens to undermine the universally-recognized prohibition against torture and other abusive treatment, and sends the dangerous message to U.S. and foreign officials that there will be no consequences for future abuses.” They also note, “Other governments implicated in the CIA torture program must also be held accountable.”

I’m cross-posting below the full text of the statement submitted to the UN, and below that I’m also taking this opportunity to provide a reminder of what the New York Times said in a powerful, hard-hitting editorial after the executive summary of the torture report was published, by cross-posting that editorial, entitled, “Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses.”

COALITION STATEMENT TO U.N. HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL DEMANDING ACCOUNTABILITY ON CIA TORTURE PROGRAM

June 24, 2015

Last December, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the summary, findings and conclusions of its four-year investigation into the Detention and Interrogation Program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Since then, the international human rights community has reiterated the call for full transparency about and accountability for this unlawful program, in which systematic human rights violations, including the crimes under international law of torture and enforced disappearance were committed. Last March, more than 20 human rights groups called on the Council to take action and demand that the United States fulfill its international human rights obligations on truth, accountability and remedy, including by appointing a special prosecutor to conduct a comprehensive and credible criminal investigation of alleged serious crimes described in the report and to establish a special fund to compensate victims.

Last month, during the United States’ UPR [Universal Periodic Review] session, a significant number of Member-States joined civil society’s call and raised the issue of accountability and reparations for the use of torture and other human rights violations in the context of U.S. counter-terrorism policies and practices.

They also emphasized the need to end indefinite detention and close the Guantánamo detention facility, one of the remaining examples of the unlawful actions taken in the name of national security since the attacks of 11 September 2001. Delivering justice for the victims and ending indefinite detention in Guantánamo are both issues that still require more decisive and urgent action from the Obama administration.

On 26 June, the world will mark the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. The U.S. government was a strong supporter of the adoption of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT), which is commemorated every year on this day. The United States is also a generous contributor to the U.N. Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture. But the U.S.’s failure to hold accountable those responsible for the CIA program of torture and enforced disappearance, to ensure the victims’ rights to truth and reparations, and to take other actions to ensure non-repetition of these heinous crimes leaves the U.S. in violation of its own obligations under UNCAT and other international instruments and is a serious blow to the international human rights system, in general, and to the global effort to eradicate torture and enforced disappearance, in particular.

During its next session, the Council will adopt the Working Group report on the U.S. UPR. We call on the Council to send a strong message against impunity for torture and enforced disappearances and demand that the United States take measures to meet the full spectrum of its obligations under international law to ensure accountability, transparency, reparations and non-repetition, including declassification of the full Senate report on the CIA detention program, independent comprehensive criminal investigation, and the issuing of apologies and compensation to victims of enforced disappearance, torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Continued impunity is a dark chapter in the history of the United States that threatens to undermine the universally-recognized prohibition against torture and other abusive treatment, and sends the dangerous message to U.S. and foreign officials that there will be no consequences for future abuses. Other governments implicated in the CIA torture program must also be held accountable and are obligated to conduct independent investigations, hold perpetrators accountable, and provide effective remedies to victims of torture, enforced disappearance and other human rights violations.

We know from the experiences of civil society groups and survivors of torture around the world that the struggle for accountability for human rights violations and the search for truth can be a long and difficult journey. Yet the United States has much to gain from rejecting impunity, returning to the rule of law, and providing adequate redress to the dozens and dozens of people it so brutally abused.

We hope the United States will follow that path.

Submitted by:

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS)

Conectas Direitos Humanos

Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)

Endorsed by

Abogadas y Abogados para la Justicia y los Derechos Humanos, A. C

Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo

Acción Solidaria en VIH/Sida

Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions

African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies

Ágora Espacio Civil Paraguay

Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic, Yale Law School

Amnesty International

Appeal for Justice

Asociación de Familiares de Presos y Desaparecidos Saharauis

Asociación MINGA

Asociación para la Prevención de la Tortura

Asociación Pro derechos Humanos

Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies

Center for Constitutional Rights

Center for Justice and Accountability

Center for Victims of Torture

Centre for Human Rights

Centro de Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres, A. C.

Centro de Documentación en Derechos Humanos “Segundo Montes Mozo S.J.”

Centro de Políticas Públicas y Derechos Humanos

Centro por la Justicia y el Derecho Internacional

Centro Regional de Derechos Humanos y Justicia de Género – Corporación Humanas

Civilis Derechos Humanos

Colectivo de Abogados “José Alvear Restrepo”

Coletivo PESO/Periferia Soberana

Comisión de Justicia y Paz

Comisión Ecuménica de Derechos Humanos

Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative

Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento

Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos

Corporación Sisma Mujer

Defensa de Niñas y Niños- Internacional

Diyarbakir Bar Association

Due Process of Law Foundation

Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights

European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights

Four Freedoms Forum & Hawai’i Institute for Human Rights

Fundación Myrna Mack

Fundar. Centro de Análisis e Investigación A.C

Gillis Long Poverty Law Center – Loyola University New Orleans College of Law

Global Justice Clinic, NYU School of Law

Grupo de Mujeres de San Cristóbal de las Casas

Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights

Human Rights Committee of the Law Society of England and Wales

Human Rights Institute of Columbia Law School

Human Rights Law Network

Human Rights Watch

Instituto Braços – Centro de Defesa de Direitos Humanos de Sergipe

Instituto Brasileiro de Ciências Criminais

Instituto de Estudios Comparados en Ciencias Penales de Guatemala

Instituto de Estudios Legales y Sociales del Uruguay

Instituto Internacional de Derecho y Sociedad

Instituto Migrações e Direitos Humanos

Instituto Pro Bono

International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination

International Commission of Jurists

International Federation for Human Rights

International Human Rights Clinic, Harvard Law School

International Human Rights Program, Boston University School of Law

International Justice Network

International-Lawyers

Justice Studies Department -Northeastern Illinois University

Kenya Human Rights Commission

KontraS (Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence) in Indonesia

Laboratório de Análise Política Mundial

Legal Resources Centre

Madres Linea Fundadora

Meiklejohn Civil Liberities Institute

Minority Rights Group International

Movimiento Autónomo de Mujeres

National Lawyers Guild

North Carolina Stop Torture Now

Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones

Oficina Jurídica Para la Mujer

Partnership For Justice

Paz y Esperanza

PEN American Center

Physicians for Human Rights

Plataforma Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, Democracia y Desarrollo

Programa de Pós Graduação em Segurança Pública e Direitos Humanos da Universidade Federal de Rondônia

Programa Venezolano de Educación Acción en Derechos Humanos

Psychologists for Social Responsibility

Quaker House

Reprieve

Santa Clara University School of Law, International Human Rights Clinic

Seguridad en Democracia

Sociedade Maranhense de Direitos Humanos

The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights

The Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance

Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC) International

Unidad de Protección a Defensores y Defensoras de Derechos Humanos de Guatemala

Unión Nacional de Mujeres Guatemaltecas

Unitarian Universalist Service Committee

US Human Rights Network

Women’s Link Worldwide

World Organization Against Torture

Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses

New York Times editorial, December 21, 2014

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.’s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down.

Americans have known about many of these acts for years, but the 524-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report erases any lingering doubt about their depravity and illegality: In addition to new revelations of sadistic tactics like “rectal feeding,” scores of detainees were waterboarded, hung by their wrists, confined in coffins, sleep-deprived, threatened with death or brutally beaten. In November 2002, one detainee who was chained to a concrete floor died of “suspected hypothermia.”

These are, simply, crimes. They are prohibited by federal law, which defines torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering.” They are also banned by the Convention Against Torture, the international treaty that the United States ratified in 1994 and that requires prosecution of any acts of torture.

So it is no wonder that today’s blinkered apologists are desperate to call these acts anything but torture, which they clearly were. As the report reveals, these claims fail for a simple reason: C.I.A. officials admitted at the time that what they intended to do was illegal.

In July 2002, C.I.A. lawyers told the Justice Department that the agency needed to use “more aggressive methods” of interrogation that would “otherwise be prohibited by the torture statute.” They asked the department to promise not to prosecute those who used these methods. When the department refused, they shopped around for the answer they wanted. They got it from the ideologically driven lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote memos fabricating a legal foundation for the methods. Government officials now rely on the memos as proof that they sought and received legal clearance for their actions. But the report changes the game: We now know that this reliance was not made in good faith.

No amount of legal pretzel logic can justify the behavior detailed in the report. Indeed, it is impossible to read it and conclude that no one can be held accountable. At the very least, Mr. Obama needs to authorize a full and independent criminal investigation.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch are to give Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes.”

The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.

But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen.

One would expect Republicans who have gone hoarse braying about Mr. Obama’s executive overreach to be the first to demand accountability, but with one notable exception, Senator John McCain, they have either fallen silent or actively defended the indefensible. They cannot even point to any results: Contrary to repeated claims by the C.I.A., the report concluded that “at no time” did any of these techniques yield intelligence that averted a terror attack. And at least 26 detainees were later determined to have been “wrongfully held.”

Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.

Note: See this page on Sen. Feinstein’s website for the executive summary of the torture report and other documents relating to it. Another version of the executive summary, on Document Cloud, is 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). 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.

Guantánamo, Stonehenge Book Readings and Music: Two Events with Hamja Ahsan – Radio Show on Sunday June 28, and Art Event in Hackney Wick on July 2

My friends,

If you’re around on Sunday, between 3pm and 5pm GMT, you can listen to me reading from my books and playing some of my favourite music with human rights activist and arts curator Hamja Ahsan (DIY Cultures), who has a show, DIY Sunday Radio, every Sunday afternoon (UK time) on One Harmony Radio, based in Brockley, south east London, where I live.

Hamja became a campaigner because his brother, Talha, a talented poet with Asberger’s Syndrome, was imprisoned without charge or trial in the UK for six years pending extradition to the US, and was then extradited, spending two years in a Supermax prison before a judge sentenced him to time served and sent him home. See the campaign’s Facebook page here.

One Harmony Radio, which mainly plays reggae music, is a community internet radio station, so you can listen to my show from anywhere in the world! The Facebook page is here.

As noted above, I’ll be reading from my books, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, The Battle of the Beanfield and The Guantánamo Files.

My first two books were about Britain’s counter-culture, the free festival movement, the significance of Stonehenge and the state suppression of dissent — still relevant in the month that marked the 30th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, when 1,300 police savagely decommissioned a convoy of men, women and children trying to get to Stonehenge to set up what would have been the 12th Stonehenge Free Festival, an anarchic month-long event that, in its last year, in 1984, had become an alternative city of at least 50,000 people. It is also, of course, just a week after the summer solstice, the centrepiece of people’s celebrations at Stonehenge.

My third book tells the stories of the men — and boys — held in the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a place set up by the Bush administration to hold prisoners without any rights whatsoever. I have been researching and writing about Guantánamo, and campaigning to get the prison closed down for the last nine years, and will continue to do so until it is shut down. I understand, from my research, that very few of the men held had any involvement with al-Qaeda and acts of international terrorism, and it is important to me, as it should be to anyone who believes in justice, that no one should be held indefinitely without charge or trial and subjected to torture, as has happened at Guantánamo. It is important to realise that terrorism is a crime, which should be tried in federal court, and that soldiers should be protected by the Geneva Conventions and freed at the end of hostilities. In Guantánamo, soldiers are treated as terrorists, terrorists are treated as super-soldiers, and everyone continues to be treated as though the normal rules regarding detention don’t apply.

As well as reading from my books and chatting to Hamja — about life, work and my campaigning, via my own website, via Close Guantánamo, which I launched in January 2012 with the US attorney Tom Wilner, and via We Stand With Shaker, which I launched last November with the activist Joanne MacInnes, to call for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison — I’ll be playing some of my favourite music, so expect lots of roots reggae, some African music, some Bob Dylan, some Hawkwind to mark the festival days, and some of my own music, by my band The Four Fathers, from our forthcoming album, Love and War. I’ll be playing some of the songs I wrote — ‘Song for Shaker Aamer’, featured in the campaign video for We Stand With Shaker, and probably another storming new song, ‘Fighting Injustice.’ Check out our free song ‘Tory Bullshit Blues’ here, and see the video for We Stand With Shaker below:

Arts night in Hackney Wick, Thursday July 2

On Thursday July 2, I’ll also be joining Hamja and several other guests for an event at the Yard Theatre in achingly hip Hackney Wick, across the river (the Lee Navigation) from the Olympic Park in Stratford, in east London. The Facebook page for that event, ‘DIY Night: Book Jam, Live Bands, DJs, Zine fair, Poetry, Performance’, is here. The Yard Theatre is at Unit 2a, Queen’s Yard, White Post Lane, Hackney Wick, London E9 5EN, and you can find a map here. The nearest tube is Hackney Wick, just five minutes away, and there are regular trains running East to Stratford and West to Dalston, Highbury & Islington and Richmond. The event is free, but a donation of £5 will be greatly appreciated to cover costs.

I will, again, be reading from my books, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, The Battle of the Beanfield and The Guantánamo Files, and I will have copies of the Stonehenge and Beanfield books for sale, although my Guantánamo book has sold out (except for a few academic hardback copies available directly from me — or paperback copies you can still find online).

The evening begins at 6pm, readings are from 7-9pm, and there are live bands from 10pm, plus DJs at various times throughout the night. The music is described, eclectically, as “Riot Grrl, Afropunk, Afrobeat, Qawwali, Asian Underground, Avant-rock, Taqwacore, post-punk, blues, no wave, electronica, 1990s alt, Suficore, lo-fi.” In addition, the Aroma Cafe serves food from from 6pm-10pm, and there’s a bar from 6pm-2am.

Other guests include: Harry Man, reading poetry related to science fiction and technology; Jacob Joyce, who has a comics stall, and will also be reading; Dee Sada, who will be reading Mary Barnes poems and speaking about R.D. Laing; Carmin Masolivier (She Grwwwls), who will be reading poetry and speaking about DIY organising; Different Skies, who will be reading prose; performance poet Riffat Ahmed; and Suficore band The Friends of Design.

Do come along if you’re around. It would be lovely to see you!

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.

Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice, 30 Years After the Battle of the Beanfield

Happy summer solstice, everyone! I thought I might visit megalithic Wiltshire this year, for my first solstice visit in 10 years, but the anti-austerity march in London — and my desire to attend it — rather put paid to that plan. My hoped-for destination was Avebury, the village built in the remains of a colossal stone circle, roughly 20 miles north of Stonehenge, which awakened — or rather reawakened — my interest in all things megalithic from 1996, when a chance visit with my new girlfriend (and now wife) Dot led to such enthusiasm on my part that I devoted much of the next ten years to visiting ancient sacred sites all over England, and in Scotland, Malta and Brittany.

I also wrote two books in this period, after my original plan failed to find a publisher. That project was, “Stonehenge and Avebury: Pilgrimages to the Heart of Ancient England,” and it was based on three long-distance walks I made with Dot and other friends in 1997 and 1998, along the Ridgeway from the Thames to Avebury, and then an eight-day trek through Wiltshire to Stonehenge, from Dorchester in Dorset, which I christened “The Stonehenge Way,” and another walk of my devising from Stonehenge to Avebury.

I hope one day to revive that particular project, but what happened in 2002 was that I was encouraged to focus on one particular aspect of the book — the Stonehenge Free Festival, my first inspiration when it came to ancient sacred sites. As a student, I had visited the festival in 1983 and 1984, and had found my view of the world transformed by this gigantic anarchic jamboree that filled the fields opposite Stonehenge every June. The photo above is from 1975, the second festival, and is from the Flickr site of Basil and Tracy Brooks. Basil played with Zorch, who played at both of the first two festivals, in 1974 and 1975. See the albums here and here.

And so, for the solstice in June 2004, I was there with fliers my first published book, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, which I launched in the Green Fields at Glastonbury Festival, courtesy of Andy Hope and his solar-powered Croissant Neuf stage. and, in the solstice in 2005, I was there again, with my second published book, The Battle of the Beanfield, which I had launched at Glastonbury again, after carrying a hundred copies of it in a rucksack across the entire water-logged site. They all sold, I’m glad to say, after I parked myself with a chair and small table next to the Green Fields’ main drag.

Both books, I should note, are still available. Follow the links above.

After the publications of both books, I spent much of the summer in 2004 and 2005 visiting festivals to talk about the history of the Stonehenge festivals, the free festival movement in general, the Beanfield and the British counter-culture — at Shambala and the Big Green Gathering and Sid Rawle’s Super Spirit Camp — before I was distracted by the human rights abuses committed in the “war on terror,” and began what has now become ten years of writing, researching and campaigning to get the US prison at Guantánamo Bay shut down, and my third book, The Guantánamo Files.

For anyone interested, there’s a video below, via YouTube, of the talk I gave at the Big Green Gathering in — probably —  2005 about Stonehenge’s mystical and pagan history, drawn from my books:

Every June, however, I revisit those times, in articles marking the summer solstice at Stonehenge, and the anniversary of the festival, and also in articles marking the anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, the violent suppression of the travellers’ convoy that was en route to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th Stonehenge Free Festival on June 1, 1985, when they were ambushed by over 1,300 police from six counties and the MoD, who brutally “decommissioned” them in a field beside the A303, and proceeded to set up a militarised exclusion zone around Stonehenge every solstice which lasted until the Law Lords ruled it illegal in 1999.

All of this is discussed in my books, as is the fact that in 2000, English Heritage, which manages the site, initiated a programme of free “managed open access” to allow people to visit Stonehenge and to stay in the stones all night to watch the sunrise — if, of course, the skies are clear.

From 2001 to 2005, I visited Stonehenge for “managed open access,” which is an extraordinary opportunity to spend some time communing with an ancient sacred site and with a host of colourful characters — although it is also an excuse for a giant party for the youth of Wiltshire and any hedonist prepared to travel. It has echoes of the festival, but nothing more. Back in the ’70s and early ’80s even hedonism had a political dimension, a spirit of dissent that has largely been eliminated by the particularly bland excuse for culture that is currently touted by government and the corporations who dominate so much of our lives, encouraging us, 24/7, to behave and to conform, and to spend our every waking moment buying sh*t we don’t need.

And so to this morning’s solstice sunrise, seen, it is reported, by an estimated 23,000 people, down from the record 36,000 who attended last year (the photo is from English Heritage’s Twitter account — how’s that for a sign of the times? — and check out this article in the Observer by Ed Vulliamy). I hope a good time was had by all, but in the year that marked the 30th anniversary of the Battle for the Beanfield and the state’s attempt to wipe out an entire sub-culture, I’d like to encourage everyone reading this to reflect on the anniversary of the Beanfield, and to remember the survivors of that terrible day, who made their way to Bratton Castle, an ancient hill-fort in Wiltshire, by the Westbury White Horse, where they attempted to hold an impromptu festival-in-exile.

As I described it in Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion (and see this article for my description of the immediate aftermath of the Beanfield):

In the end, 2,000 people held a reconvened Stonehenge Solstice Celebration at Bratton Castle, an Iron Age hill-fort and, appropriately enough, a former Neolithic ritual site, complete with a long barrow, above the Westbury White Horse just twelve miles north west of Stonehenge. Hawkwind turned up to play, and the police stayed off-site. To this extent it was a triumph, although the fall-out from recent events was still readily apparent. Margaret Greenfields, a festival regular and welfare volunteer, recalled, “It was like a refugee camp — mud, rain, wind, people shocked and dazed, a man with a broken leg in plaster hauling water in the mud, people with dysentery.”

The excellent Festival Zone website noted that Ozric Tentacles also played, and that “[r]oads were blocked off and if anyone left the site they were not allowed to return.” See the Festival Zone’s archive about the Stonehenge Free Festival here.

Creative dissent did not, of course, die at the Beanfield. Surprises galore were in store in the years that followed, as the rave scene sprang to life out of nowhere, followed by the inspirational road protest movement. Then, in the late 1990s, the anti-globalisation movement, which was a global movement of resistance, grew huge, and caused enormous consternation to the authorities. But by 2003, when the largest ever protests in history took place — and were ignored — calling for there to be no illegal invasion of Iraq — we hit a brick wall, and haven’t been able to topple it ever since.

With greed out of control, the gap between the rich and the poor growing every day, the need for urgent environmental change neglected, and politics drifting ominously to the right, the need for massive left-wing dissent is, I would argue, greater now that it has been at any time in my life. I hope, as this dreadful Tory government, butchering the state and persecuting the most vulnerable members of society, tries to maintain power for the next five years, people will rise up in numbers not seen since the Iraq protest in 2003, and, most pertinently, the 1980s, under Margaret Thatcher, when many people who are now sleepwalking to disaster knew who was the enemy.

Enjoy the solstice today, but don’t forget those who have been persecuted by the state over the last 30 years, and those who are today’s “enemy within.”

For reflections on Stonehenge and the summer solstice, see Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present, It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Stonehenge Summer Solstice 2010: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, RIP Sid Rawle, Land Reformer, Free Festival Pioneer, Stonehenge Stalwart, Happy Summer Solstice to the Revellers at Stonehenge — Is it Really 27 Years Since the Last Free Festival?, Stonehenge and the Summer Solstice: On the 28th Anniversary of the Last Free Festival, Check Out “Festivals Britannia”, Memories of Youth and the Need for Dissent on the 29th Anniversary of the last Stonehenge Free Festival and 30 Years On from the Last Stonehenge Free Festival, Where is the Spirit of Dissent?

For more on the Beanfield, see my articles, In the Guardian: Remembering the Battle of the Beanfield, which provides excerpts from The Battle of the Beanfield (and see the Guardian article here), The Battle of the Beanfield 25th Anniversary: An Interview with Phil Shakesby, aka Phil the Beer, a prominent traveller who died five years ago, Remember the Battle of the Beanfield: It’s the 27th Anniversary Today of Thatcher’s Brutal Suppression of Traveller Society, Radio: On Eve of Summer Solstice at Stonehenge, Andy Worthington Discusses the Battle of the Beanfield and Dissent in the UK, It’s 28 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Crushed Travellers at the Battle of the Beanfield, Back in Print: The Battle of the Beanfield, Marking Margaret Thatcher’s Destruction of Britain’s Travellers and It’s 29 Years Since the Battle of the Beanfield, and the World Has Changed Immeasurably.

Also see my article on Margaret Thatcher’s death, “Kindness is Better than Greed”: Photos, and a Response to Margaret Thatcher on the Day of Her Funeral.

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.

Photos: The Impressive 250,000-Strong Anti-Austerity March in London

See my photo set on Flickr here.

Today I was delighted to attend the huge anti-austerity march in central London on June 20 organised by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity. Although the weather was indifferent, the turnout wasn’t, and around 250,000 people marched from the Bank of England to Parliament Square to show the many, many reasons ordinary, hard-working British people have for despising the Tory government, who, in May’s General Election, won over 50% of the seats, with just over 36% of the votes, cast, and the support of less than a quarter of those eligible to vote. See my article here about the need for a new voting system involving  proportional representation.

I arrived by bike in central London after the march had set off, meeting it on Fleet Street and spending some time on the Strand watching the marchers go by, which was where I realised quite how big it was, as the people — cheerful but with a sense of intent and a plethora of excellent hand-made placards — just kept coming. I hope the message that comes through strongly from today’s event is not only a message to the government — that more and more of us are waking up, and we are not happy about what is happening, but also to the organisers of today, and to the unions, who supported it: we need events like this to take place on a regular basis, at least every six months, if not every three, so we can keep showing solidarity with each other, and also to keep demonstrating it to the government.

The Tories’ austerity programme, which has involved massive cuts to the public sector and to the welfare state, including the NHS, and attacks on the unemployed and the disabled, is driven not by need but by a malignant ideology — the desire to privatise almost everything (but not their own salaries, of course) for the benefit of the private sector, often using taxpayers’ money to achieve their ends, and often benefitting them directly, as they are involved in the companies making a profit.

Although the Tories’ austerity policies have been disastrous economically, so that it has cost more to ruin the lives of millions of people than to have left them alone, the message has still not got through to the majority of the British people — and that’s without even getting into the mess that is the housing market, especially in London and the south east, where — yes, you guessed it — the rich are facilitated to get richer with no restraints on their behaviour, while those who are younger and/or poorer are being asked to pay far more than ever before, and far more than is justifiable, to get on the housing ladder or even just to pay rent. I can only hope that events like this will help to wake up the millions of people who stand to have their lives further impoverished by the Tories, and who need to make a stand if we are not to descend into an increasingly divided country, with an ever-growing gulf between the rich and the poor over the next five years.

The fight is on, and the struggle continues. Today, however, we can take heart that we sent out a powerful message to the government — that we’re not going to just sit down and shut up, and let the Tories wreck the country and turn the clock back to some distant past: perhaps the late 18th century (but with Twitter), or even the middle ages, where the trinkets of modernity (think having a mobile phone while toiling in some feudal field) won’t save us from our Tory rulers, who really, really, really don’t care about most of us at all.

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.

The Path to Closing Guantánamo

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

On Saturday, six Yemenis were freed from Guantánamo, and resettled in Oman, bringing the prison’s population down to 116 men, the lowest total it has been since the first few months of the prison’s operation back in 2002. I wrote about the release of the men here, and amended the details of our prisoner list here, and, in response to the releases, I thought it would also be useful to follow up by looking at where we stand with President Obama’s long-promised mission to close the prison.

President Obama made his promise to close Guantánamo on his second day in office, pledging to close it within a year. Since failing to keep the promise, he has sporadically stated again his desire to see the prison closed — most notably two years ago, when a prison-wide hunger strike prompted him to promise to resume releasing prisoners, after a period of nearly three years in which releases had almost ground to a halt, because of opposition in Congress and the president ‘s refusal to expend political capital overcoming those obstacles.

In April, as I wrote about here, the Washington Post reported, as I paraphrased it,  that all the men approved for release in Guantánamo — at the time 57 out of the 122 men still held — would be “freed by the end of the year, and, if Congress proves obstructive, the Obama administration might close the facility before the end of Obama’s presidency by unilaterally moving the remaining prisoners to the US mainland.” I added, however, that, realistically, “it might be wisest to view these suggestions as the administration stating its best-case scenario.”

In the New York Times on Saturday, Charlie Savage updated the Washington Post‘s analysis from April, noting how President Obama’s plan to close the prison at Guantánamo, which, Savage noted, “he has criticized as costly and a potent symbol for anti-American propaganda,” would have to involve “bringing the remaining detainees into the United States for trial or continued wartime detention in a different prison.”

Since 2009, when this idea was first proposed, in relation to a facility in Illinois, many Republicans have opposed that plan, as Savage noted, and, as he also pointed out, “some civil libertarians” as well: those who fear that it will enshrine Guantánamo’s injustices — primarily, these days, indefinite detention without charge or trial — on US soil. In contrast, here at “Close Guantánamo,” Tom Wilner and I, the co-founders of this campaign, and some of our founding supporters, have long maintained that bringing them to the US mainland would actually establish new legal challenges, because there are much stronger safeguards on the US mainland than in America’s Cuban outpost to prevent imprisonment without charge or trial.

Under President Bush, that was established when Jose Padilla, a US citizen, was held without rights as an “enemy combatant” and tortured on US soil, but, when challenged, the Bush administration backed down and moved him into the federal court system, refusing to try to defend its claimed right to hold anyone incommunicado and without charging them.

In addition, as Charlie Savage noted, Congress has “outlawed bringing any detainees onto domestic soil” for any reason, in successive versions of the annual National Defense Authorization Act.

In response to the release of the six Yemenis, Republican critics made their usual hyperbolic complaints. Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, who is the chair of the Committee on Homeland Security, criticized the transfers, as did several other Republicans.

In a statement, Rep. McCaul claimed, “Despite the high terror threat to our country, the president continues to open the jail cells at Guantánamo Bay, giving potential terrorists the ability to return to the fight.” He added, “The president needs to be up front with the American people, rather than have the release of dangerous detainees buried in a Saturday news dump.”

This was nonsense on every conceivable front. There is no “high terror threat,” only the politics of fear peddled by cheap politicians and media pundits, and anyone interested can find out easily enough — from my report, for example — why the six men freed cannot be regard as terrorists — because they never were.

In addition, it was untruthful to suggest that the president wasn’t “upfront” about releasing the men. As stipulated in the laws made by Congress (primarily by Republicans), before anyone can be transferred from Guantánamo, the defense secretary must sign an authorisation declaring that it is safe to do so, and Congress has to receive 30 days’ notice of the proposed transfer.

Guantánamo provisions in this year’s NDAA

The latest release of prisoners took place while the Senate is considering amendments to this year’s NDAA, which currently maintains the ban on bringing prisoners to the US mainland for any reason, as well as the certification and notification requirements regarding any planned prisoner transfers. The House of Representatives has passed its own outrageous version of the bill that, as Charlie Savage noted, would tighten the limits on the transfer of prisoners “in a way that could in effect stop any more releases, including blocking the departure of the 51 men waiting on the transfer list.” 43 of those 51 men are Yemenis.

The Republicans have controlled the House of Representatives for several years now, whereas Democrats ran the Senate until the mid-term elections in 2014, and in 2013 — and last year before control passed to the Republicans — passed versions of the NDAA that made it easier for the administration to release prisoners from Guantánamo.

This year, however, another option has emerged, via Sen. John McCain, who took over as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee from Sen. Carl Levin, who was a powerful influence for sanity in Congress. McCain has put forward a proposal that, as Charlie Savage described it, “would instead call for an up-or-down vote in both chambers of Congress on whether to approve an administration plan for moving the remaining detainees to a prison on American soil.” As Savage noted, “It is not clear what circumstances would generate sufficient political support in Congress, especially among the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, to approve any such plan,” but it may be that McCain can exert some influence to support his plans that Democrats would be unable to achieve.

In contrast, the White House, as Savage put it, “argues that Congress should simply drop the restrictions”, an eminently sensible proposal, but one that only highlights the extent to which, in Congress, cynical political maneuvering has replaced doing the right thing when it comes to Guantánamo.

Charlie Savage also noted how the Senate bill “would also let the military temporarily bring a detainee into the United States for medical treatment,” another sensible suggestion that is currently prohibited — and remains so in the House’s version of the bill. As Savage noted, “The cost and difficulty of transporting specialized medical equipment and doctors to the prison has been an issue of recurring concern as the detainee population ages.”

Both bills impose a ban on transferring any prisoners to Yemen, but as I have repeatedly noted, there is consensus, across the entire US establishment, that releasing prisoners to Yemen is unsafe, because of the security situation in the country. Until the end of last year, this was a problem, because President Obama had not found any other homes for the Yemenis who make up 43 of the 51 prisoners approved for release. Since last November, however, he has released 18 Yemenis to third countries, and, presumably, the envoys for the closure of Guantánamo — Paul Lewis in the Pentagon, and Charles Trumbull as the acting envoy in the State Department — are looking at other countries that will be prepared to help, with more Gulf countries presumably being an option.

McCain’s proposal — which he hailed as a “bipartisan compromise” and a “workable solution” crafted with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — was passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 14, and when it did The Hill wrote about it, noting that, while McCain is “one of Obama’s harshest critics on foreign policy, he supports closing the controversial prison camp, and has proposed what could be Obama’s last shot at closing the prison.” McCain’s bill, as The Hill put it, “would extend current restrictions on transferring detainees out of Guantánamo and restore ones from 2013, but also require the administration to submit a plan to Congress on closing the military detention facility.”

The Hill added, “The plan would include a case-by-case determination on the disposition of each remaining detainee, and address the legal challenges of bringing them to the United States. The administration would also be asked to spell out what additional legal authorities that would be needed, and how the Pentagon would treat future combatants captured under the laws of war.”

The Hill also noted that prisoners “would have limited rights under the bill if transferred to the US, to allay concerns they would have the same rights as American citizens.”

That latter point is troubling, of course, but it is unclear if, otherwise, President Obama has a real opportunity to close Guantánamo before he leaves office — unless he were to attempt to do so by executive order, which would, of course, thoroughly alienate Congress.

McCain’s bill, predictably, attracted criticism from Republicans. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said that, although he voted for the legislation in committee, he planned to fight it on the floor. In a statement, he said, with the usual hyperbole of Republicans regarding Guantánamo, “Members from many states have voiced concern with housing these terrorists in their states, especially now that ISIL has demonstrated the ability to call up sleeper cells to attack locations here in our country. I don’t want a target in Oklahoma.”

Nevertheless, The Hill pointed out that McCain would only need the support six Republicans, in addition to the Democrats, “to stop any attempts to strip the Guantánamo provision from the bill” in the Senate, although it could then “hit a brick wall in the House, whose version of the bill “would extend a ban on detainee transfers to the United States, as well as on modifying or constructing any facilities in the US to house the detainees.” Just before the bill passed on May 15, the House also adopted an amendment to extend those restrictions for two years. The House bill “would also restore the more stringent certification requirements that Congress did away with” in the legislation for 2014 and 2015, and would “block transfers to any ‘combat zone.'”

With some understatement, The Hill noted that this “would limit the administration’s options,” and added that human rights groups “decried the House’s move, saying it would make it nearly impossible to transfer 102 of the 122 remaining detainees from the facility.”

Matt Hawthorne, Policy Director at the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, said in a statement on May 15, “The Guantánamo provisions in the House bill are an attempt to block nearly all transfers out of Guantánamo and to ensure that the prison there remains open forever.” It is a comment with which we at “Close Guantánamo” agree.

Speaking about the Armed Services Committee bill, John McCain expressed his hope that, “if we complete … this proposal about Guantánamo Bay — which I am convinced is a very workable proposal — the president would be then more inclined to sign the bill, since we all know that [closing the prison] was the president’s commitment when he came to office back in 2008.”

The Hill noted that, although earlier this year it “seemed that McCain had backtracked on his support for closing the facility, after he supported legislation from Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) that would have added more restrictions on transfers,” he “said his position has remained the same: that if the president proposed a plan for closing Guantánamo, he would be willing to work with him.”

“I’ve always been in favor of closing Guantánamo because of the image Guantánamo has in the world, whether it’s deserved or not deserved,” he said.

The Senate Armed Service Committee’s amendments can be found on the Just Security website — with additional discussion — and the full text of the Senate bill can be found here, with the Senate Armed Services Committee’s version here.

On June 4, while it was being debated in the Senate, Just Security noted that “White House staff advised the President to veto the SASC bill, in part due to ‘unwise’ and ‘unnecessary’ restrictions it places on the closure of the detention facility at Guantánamo and the transfer of detainees.”

The future of Guantánamo, then, is still very much in the air, with just a year and a half left of the Obama presidency. Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we fervently hope a solution can be reached before the inauguration of the next president, in January 2017, because by that point, he or she will be entering the White House just a week after the 15th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo — an anniversary that no American president should have to mark, let alone on their inauguration.

* * * * *

What the White House says

Below are excerpts from the White House’s Statement of Administration Policy regarding the SASC proposals:

The Administration strongly objects to provisions of the bill that would impede efforts to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As the Administration has said many times before, operating this facility weakens our national security by draining resources, damaging our relationships with key allies and partners, and emboldening violent extremists.

While the Administration appreciates the additional flexibility provided by section 1034, which would permit the temporary transfer of detainees to the United States for certain medical care, other provisions of the bill are more restrictive than existing provisions to which the Administration has repeatedly objected. Not only would provisions of the bill extend existing restrictions, they would impose additional unwise and unnecessary ones that would further impede efforts to responsibly close the facility. While the bill would relax certain of these restrictions if Congress approves a plan to close the facility by joint resolution, this process for congressional approval is unnecessary and overly restrictive. Sections 1031 and 1032 would prohibit the use of funds to construct or modify any facility in the United States to house detainees or to transfer Guantanamo detainees to the United States, except in the limited case of temporary medical transfers authorized by section 1034, until Congress approves a plan to close the facility. Sections 1033 and 1035 would impose more onerous restrictions than current law does on transfers abroad and would prohibit certain categories of transfers entirely. These provisions undermine our national security by limiting our ability to act as our military, diplomatic, and other national security professionals deem appropriate in a given case. Under existing law, the Secretary of Defense is already required to make a determination that actions have been or will be taken to substantially mitigate risks to the United States or U.S. persons or interests posed by detainee transfers abroad.

The President has objected to the inclusion of these and similar provisions in prior legislation. The restrictions contained in this bill are unwarranted and threaten to interfere with the Executive Branch’s ability to determine the appropriate disposition of detainees and its flexibility to determine when and where to prosecute them, based on the facts and circumstances of each case and our national security interests, and when and where to transfer them consistent with our national security and our humane treatment policy. Sections 1032, 1033, and 1035 would, moreover, violate constitutional separation-of-powers principles under certain circumstances, and section 1035 could in some circumstances interfere with a detainee’s right to the writ of habeas corpus.

The Administration also strongly objects to the requirements in sections 1033(b)(2) and 1037, which would require the Secretary of Defense to provide Congress with diplomatic assurances regarding detainee transfers and reports containing such assurances. Across two administrations, the Executive Branch has consistently informed Congress and represented before U.S. courts that disclosing such diplomatic assurances from foreign governments would have a chilling effect on those countries’ willingness to cooperate on detainee transfers.

The Administration objects finally to the additional reporting requirement in section 1036, which would require the Secretary of Defense to submit an unclassified report to Congress on past detainee assessments produced by the Joint Task Force-Guantanamo. The Administration does not believe this section, as drafted, is a productive measure and will treat this provision, along with sections 1033(b)(2) and 1037, consistent with the President’s constitutional authority in this area.

And below, for completeness, are the proposals from the SASC bill (on pp. 203-5):

What the Senate Armed Services Committee version of the NDAA says

Subtitle D—Counterterrorism

Prohibition on use of funds to construct or modify facilities in the United States to house detainees transferred from United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (sec. 1031)

The committee recommends a provision that would prohibit the use of funds to construct or modify facilities in the United States to house detainees transferred from Guantanamo. The prohibition would only be lifted if the Secretary of Defense submits a plan for the disposition of all detainees, as provided in a subsequent section, and the plan is approved by Congress.

Limitation on the transfer or release of individuals detained at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo (sec. 1032)

The stated policy of the United States remains to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo as soon as possible. The committee has long requested a detailed plan for the disposition of all individuals held there. Thus far, the Secretary of Defense has failed to provide such a plan. Prior to authorizing the transfer of detainees into the United States the committee seeks a comprehensive plan that will describe the disposition of all detainees, including where each detainee will be held or transferred, the costs associated with continued detention, the legal risks of any transfer, and what additional authorities are needed.

Therefore, the committee recommends a provision that would prohibit the transfer to the United States of detainees in Guantanamo except for detention, trial, or incarceration. Such domestic transfers could only occur, however, after the Secretary of Defense determines that the transfer is in the national security interests of the United States, determines that appropriate actions have been taken or will be taken to address any risk to public safety; and notifies appropriate committees of Congress.

The limited authority to transfer detainees to the United States under this provision would only become effective after the Secretary of Defense submits a report detailing a plan for all individuals held at Guantanamo and Congress approves the plan. The provision would provide expedited procedures for congressional consideration of the submitted plan.

Reenactment and modification of certain prior requirements for certifications relating to transfer of detainees at Untied States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to foreign countries and other foreign entities (sec. 1033)

The committee recommends a provision that would prohibit the use of any amounts authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Defense to be used to transfer or release any individual detained at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the individual’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity. This prohibition would apply unless the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence, provides a written certification to Congress addressing several requirements at least 30 days prior to the transfer of any such individual. This section would also prohibit the Secretary of Defense from using any funds for the transfer of any such individual to the custody or effective control of the individual’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity if there is a confirmed case of any individual transferred from United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the same country or entity who engaged in terrorist activity subsequent to their transfer. This section would allow the Secretary of Defense to waive certain certification requirements if the Secretary determines that alternative actions will be taken, that actions taken will substantially mitigate risks posed by the individual to be transferred, and that the transfer is in the national security interests of the United States. Whenever the Secretary uses the waiver, the Secretary must provide a report that includes a copy of the waiver and determination, a statement of the basis for the determination, and a summary of the alternative actions to be taken. The section would also require the certification to include a description for the cooperation for which favorable consideration was so given and a description of operational outcomes, if any, affected by such cooperation. Finally, this section would repeal current law, as contained in section 1035 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 (Public Law 113–66).

This provision would expire once a plan for the disposition of all detainees is submitted to Congress and that plan is approved by Congress, as provided for in a subsequent section. The notification requirements of section 1035 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014 (Public Law 113–66) would, at that point, govern foreign transfers.

Authority to temporarily transfer individuals detained at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United States for emergency or critical medical treatment (sec. 1034)

The committee recommends a provision that would allow for the temporary transfer of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a Department of Defense medical facility in the United States for the sole purpose of providing the individual medical treatment if the Secretary determines that: the medical treatment is necessary to prevent death or imminent significant injury or harm to the health of the individual; the medical treatment is not available to be provided at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without incurring excessive and unreasonable costs; the estimated costs of the treatment would be cheaper in the United States; and the Department of Defense has provided for appropriate security measures for the custody and control of the individual during any period in which the individual is temporarily in the United States. The provision also requires notice to Congress and limitations on the exercise of the authority to provide that the individual will be returned to United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Prohibition on use of funds for transfer or release to Yemen of individuals detained at United States Naval Facility, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (sec. 1035)

The committee recommends a provision that would prohibit the use of funds authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Defense to transfer, release, or assist in the transfer or release of any individual detained in the custody or under the control of the Department of Defense at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the custody or control of the Republic of Yemen or any entity within Yemen.

Report on current detainees at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, determined or assessed to be high risk or medium risk (sec. 1036)

The committee recommends a provision that would require the Secretary of Defense to provide a report to Congress, in unclassified form, listing the names of all individuals detained at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who have been assessed by the Joint Task Force Guantanamo to be a high or medium risk to the United States, its interests, or allies.

Report to Congress on memoranda of understanding with foreign countries regarding transfer of detainees at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (sec. 1037)

The committee recommends a provision that would require a report of the Secretary of Defense setting forth the written memorandum of understanding between the United States Government and the government of the foreign country concerned regarding each individual detained at Guantanamo transferred to a foreign country during the 18-month period ending on the date of the enactment of this Act or, if there was no written memorandum of understanding, the report shall contain an unclassified statement of that fact.

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.

800 Years of Magna Carta: The Stench of Hypocrisy Regarding Habeas Corpus for Shaker Aamer and Other Guantánamo Prisoners

Sometimes the stench of hypocrisy is so overpowering that one wonders how those mired in it can avoid gagging while they deliver their outrageous lies.

That was the case today in Runnymede, west of London, where, 800 years ago today, the barons of England forced King John to sign Magna Carta (the Grand Charter), a document that arose out of their anger at being made to pay for the king’s foreign wars, and which, significantly, limited his power.

Its most famous clause — Clause 39 — introduced habeas corpus to the world — the right not to be imprisoned without a fair trial. It states, “No free man shall be seized or imprisoned … except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land,” and its lasting significance is generally considered with Clause 40 as well, which states, “To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay justice.”

In today’s Guardian, Owen Bowcott noted that clauses 39 and 40 “are jointly seen as embodying what have become the rights of habeas corpus — banning arbitrary detention — and trial by jury,” although, as he noted in response to the question, “Why do Americans revere Magna Carta far more than the English?”:

Magna Carta was resurrected by the 17th century chief justice, Sir Edward Coke, as an ancient source of rights and it was deployed in legal battles to resist excessive royal powers. Early colonists took Magna Carta and wrote their interpretation of its clauses into their founding charters.

“Coke, who was widely regarded as the most learned lawyer of his day, rescued Magna Carta from obscurity and transformed it from a somewhat technical catalogue of feudal regulations into the foundation document of the English constitution,” [Lord] Sumption [who is a British Supreme Court Justice and a medieval historian] said. “It is really Coke’s idea of Magna Carta that has been exported to the world, and not the version that King John or his barons would have recognised.”

Significantly, of course, the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned only applied initially to a small and privileged part of the population, and it was not until the 17th century — as Lord Sumption noted — that the procedure for issuing a writ of habeas corpus was first codified, in the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, and further struggles were required before the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned applied to everyone, whatever their sex or status.

It has, of course, occasionally been suspended, when the authorities have claimed that there is some sort of unprecedented emergency. In the Second World War, the US suspended habeas corpus for 110,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps, only apologizing and offering compensation many years later.

More recently, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the US claimed that those seized in its “war on terror” could be held without rights — at Guantánamo and in other facilities, as well as in “black sites” run by the CIA — and although the prisoners were eventually granted habeas corpus rights by the Supreme Court, in Rasul v. Bush in June 2004, Congress then passed legislation designed to curtail this rights, in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and it was not until June 2008, in Boumediene v Bush, that the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had acted unconstitutionally, and once more granted the men habeas corpus rights.

Although the Boumediene ruling led to 38 prisoners having their habeas corpus petitions granted by judges, in a series of rulings in 2010 and 2011, the appeals court judges — in the D.C. Circuit Court — vacated three of those rulings, reversed three others and, most importantly, changed the rules regarding the habeas petitions so that the lower court judges had to give a presumption of accuracy to whatever information the government came up with that purported to be evidence — however ridiculous it may have been.

As a result, no habeas corpus petitions have been granted since July 2010, effectively gutting habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners — and when the Supreme Court was repeatedly given the opportunity to challenge the Circuit Court’s rulings, they refused to do so.

And so, on the day that Magna Carta — and habeas corpus — was so lavishly celebrated at Runnymede, by the Queen, by David Cameron and by Loretta Lynch, the US Attorney General, who flew in for the occasion, the stench of hypocrisy primarily related to the 116 men still held at Guantánamo, and, on the British side, to Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison. In Shaker’s case, he has the support of numerous groups, individuals and organisations: MPs, who set up a Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, tabled a Parliamentary motion that was supported by the government, and visited the US last month to call for his release, the Daily Mail, and campaign groups — We Stand With Shaker, which I established with Joanne MacInnes last November, and the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign.

These are men who are still so thoroughly deprived of their rights that there is no mechanism that can automatically lead to their release — no sentence to come to an end, because almost all the prisoners have never been charged or tried, and no end of hostilities, because they have never been held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions.

Only political will can secure their release, and with opposition from Republicans, and an unwillingness to spend political capital on President Obama’s part, 51 of the 116 men still held — including Shaker Aamer — continue to be held even though they were approved for release over five years ago by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that the president established shortly after taking office in January 2009. Moreover, some of the men, like Shaker Aamer, were approved for release under President Bush years before — in 2007, in Shaker Aamer’s case.

So to hear David Cameron talk of the importance of Magna Carta on its anniversary, and to try to bask in its reflected glory, is hypocrisy of a particular stinking variety, not just because Shaker Aamer remains imprisoned in Guantánamo, but also because a number of foreign nationals have, in some cases, been held for over 13 years in the UK without charge or trial — sometimes in prison, sometimes under forms of house arrest — on the basis of secret evidence that cannot be tested, and without any figure of authority ever having spoken a single word to them, or asked them a single question. See some of my many articles here, here and here.

In addition, of course, under David Cameron, measures have been introduced to strip people of their citizenship, with no legal process whatsoever, if they are suspected of terrorism by the security services and by the home secretary, and the Tories’ latest wheeze is to scrap the Human Rights Act, a proposal of such idiocy that, for it to proceed, we would have to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, the Council of Europe and the EU, even though Tories were deeply involved in drafting the Convention after the Second World War.

In his speech, David Cameron had the nerve to say:

Eight hundred years ago, on this day, King John put his seal to a document that would change the world.

We talk about the ‘law of the land’ and this is the very land where that law – and the rights that flow from it – took root.

The limits of executive power, guaranteed access to justice, the belief that there should be something called the rule of law, that there shouldn’t be imprisonment without trial, Magna Carta introduced the idea that we should write these things down and live by them.

With legal aid and judicial review threatened or being shut down by Cameron’s government, and Shaker Aamer abandoned in Guantánamo, there wasn’t a line in the above that rang true, and later in his short and profoundly cynical speech the Prime Minister also spoke about the government’s current plans, pretending that his plans to destroy our rights are actually some sort of necessary reform.

“But here in Britain, ironically, the place where those ideas were first set out,” he said, “the good name of ‘human rights’ has sometimes become distorted and devalued. It falls to us in this generation to restore the reputation of those rights — and their critical underpinning of our legal system.”

In response, as the Guardian reported:

Amnesty International UK’s head of policy and government affairs Allan Hogarth said Cameron’s use of the anniversary of Magna Carta to justify scrapping the HRA would “have those 13th-century barons spinning in their highly-ornate, lead-lined coffins”, adding: “Any move to scrap the Act would be a real blow for human rights in this country and around the world.”

As the Guardian also noted, Liberty’s director Shami Chakrabarti “accused the prime minister of hypocrisy” following his speech. She said, “The Prime Minister could give a masterclass in bare-faced cheek, using Magna Carta day to denigrate our Human Rights Act. But we will take no lessons in rights and freedoms from a leader ‎who wants to dilute them to the detriment of everyone in the UK and wider watching world.”

Loretta Lynch was more low-key, but even so it was impossible for her to discuss Magna Carta without the spectre of Guantánamo hovering over her.

She noted that the fundamental principles of the Magna Carta have “given hopes to those who face oppression. They have given a voice to those yearning for the redress of wrongs” — and I’m sure those still held in Guantánamo, if they ever get to hear her words, will agree that they are “yearning for the redress of wrongs,” but that, despite the show in Runnymede today, they actually have no voice, and no expectation that fine words will lead to them being freed or receiving anything resembling justice.

On the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the 51 men approved for release in Guantánamo — including Shaker Aamer — and the other 65 men (except those facing trials), who are all still held deliberately without charge or trial, deserve better; in fact, deserve the freedom from arbitrary detention that was promised in Runnymede 80 years ago. Free them now!

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.

Who Are the Six Yemenis Freed from Guantánamo and Resettled in Oman?

So it’s good news from Guantánamo, as six Yemenis — long cleared for release — have been freed and resettled in the Gulf state of Oman. These are the first men to be released since January, and the first under the watch of the new defense secretary Ashton Carter, who, as defense secretary, has to sign off on any proposed releases, certifying to Congress that it is safe to do so.

They follow four of their compatriots who were resettled in Oman in the last batch of transfers, five months ago, on January 14. With these releases, 116 men remain at Guantánamo, and 51 of those men have been approved for release — 44 since 2009, when the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after first taking office in January 2009 issued its recommendations about who to release, who to prosecute and who to continue holding without charge or trial. The other seven have had their release approved, in the last year and a half, by Periodic Review Boards, established to review the cases of all the prisoners not approved for release by the task force, with the exception of the small number of men facing trials.

Of these 51, all but eight are Yemenis, the victims of a refusal, across the entire US establishment, to contemplate repatriating them because of the security situation in their home country. The other eight include Tariq al-Sawah, a morbidly obese Egyptian who was cleared for release by a PRB in February. and three men cleared by the task force and mentioned in a Washington Post article predicting a rash of releases in April, which I wrote about here.

These three men are Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz, a Mauritanian, Younus Chekhouri (aka Younis Chekkouri), a Moroccan — and, notably, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, whose release is actively sought by the British government, by the cross-party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, and by numerous campaigners, including myself, as the co-founder and co-director, with Joanne MacInnes, of the We Stand With Shaker campaign, and as a long-time supporter of the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign. Both groups played a prominent role in fundraising for a recent visit to Washington D.C. by a delegation of MPs from the Parliamentary Group, and I was also able to help arrange the MPs’ meetings in the US through a close contact.

Although it is hoped that Shaker Aamer’s release will follow within the next few months — as will the release of the other men mentioned above, and some more of the Yemenis — the bureaucratic process leading to those releases is, apparently, not yet underway. The New York Times reported, “The break in the six-month lull in transfers does not appear to signal the start of any flurry of releases. According to officials familiar with Guantánamo policy, no further transfers are imminent, and the weekend releases were not a new decision but a leftover piece of a deal negotiated last year, when Oman agreed to accept 10 men.”

The bureaucratic burden involves not only Ashton Carter’s approval, but a requirement to give 30 days’ notice to Congress prior to any release, and, in Shaker Aamer’s case, apparently a high-level meeting — a Principals’ Meeting — that is required to approve his release to the UK (where he is a permanent legal resident, with a British wife and four British children), and not, as the US apparently intended for many years, to Saudi Arabia, the country of his birth.

As the Times also noted, however, “the six transfers represent a milestone for the administration: When President Obama took office in 2009 — and vowed to close the prison within a year, a policy goal that he has failed to achieve — there were 242 detainees at the prison. After this transfer, fewer than half of that number remain.”

The Times also mentioned plans to transfer two other men, noting that “officials familiar with Guantánamo detention policy said there were packages for the transfer of two other lower-level detainees, including the proposed repatriation of a Mauritanian man [Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz], awaiting Mr. Carter’s approval, but no pending transfers for which Congress has already been notified.”

Who are the six Yemenis?

The six men released in Oman are: Idris Qader Idris, 36; Sharaf Ahmed Masud, 37; Jalal Salam Awad (aka Jalal Bin Amer), 42; Saad al-Azani, 36; Emad Hassan, 35; and Muhammed al Zarnuqi, 38. Their ISN numbers (the numbers by which they were known in Guantánamo instead of by their names) were: 35, 170, 564, 575, 680 and 691.

Idris Qader Idris (ISN 35) is one of around a dozen men represented by the Office of the Federal Defender for the Northern District of Ohio, whose lawyer, Carlos Warner, mentioned him in an interview with the Talking Dog in 2013, during the prison-wide hunger strike, which I cross-posted as “It’s Going to End in Men Dying”: Carlos Warner, Guantánamo Attorney, Discusses the Hunger Strike.

In an article in 2010, I explained how he had “stated that he taught the Koran in Kabul for approximately eight months,” and that, set against his story, in documents publicly released by the Pentagon, were “just two allegations: that the individual who facilitated his travel to Afghanistan from Yemen ‘has been identified by a known al-Qaeda member as a fund collector and recruiter for al-Qaeda,’ and that [a] group of 30 Arabs that he joined as he fled Afghanistan for Pakistan was ‘organised’ by Mohammed Annas,” described as a “known alias” of Ali Hamza Ismail (aka Ali Hamza al-Bahlul). A propagandist for al-Qaeda, al-Bahlul was convicted in a one-sided military commission trial in 2008, who has had that conviction overturned in a number of rulings in the last few years, culminating in a momentous decision taken just two days ago.

In the case of Sharaf Masud (ISN 170), I stated in an article in 2010, based on documents publicly released by the Pentagon, that, “In Guantánamo, it was reported that Masud traveled to Afghanistan ‘because he heard that the Afghan leader led by Islamic ways’ and that he supported the Taliban, but ‘did not travel to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban … because it was Muslim versus Muslim.'” While generally unacknowledged by the US authorities, it was clear that many of the men who were told to go to Afghanistan by pro-Taliban figures in their home countries were not informed that the war in Afghanistan was a civil war between Muslims — the Taliban on one side and the Northern Alliance on the other.

Masud also stated, as I described it, that he “‘left Kabul because the Afghans were trying to kill Arabs in the market,’ took a taxi back to Jalalabad, and then joined a group of people walking to the border, where he was arrested after asking to be taken to his embassy.” As I also stated, “There were no allegations that he took part on any kind of combat — only claims that he stayed in guest houses for four months– and a ludicrous allegation by a ‘senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,’ who ‘noted the detainee looked familiar and that he may be a Tunisian with connections to Italy,'” which of course was patently untrue. The source of that particular allegation was Abu Zubaydah, for whom he Bush administration’s torture program was first implemented, who was not actually a member of al-Qaeda at all.

Jalal Bin Amer (ISN 564) is represented by lawyers at Killmer, Lane & Newman in Denver, Colorado. As I explained in an article in February 2011, “The 11-Year Old American Girl Who Knows More About Guantánamo Than Most US Lawmakers,” when Sammie Killmer, the 11-year old daughter of one of the lawyers, Darold Killmer, wrote about Guantánamo for a school project, she came up with short descriptions for each of her father’s firm’s clients, which were wonderfully descriptive. Sammie was told that Jalal “talks very fast and likes pictures of very beautiful animals.”

In 2013, he took part in the prison-wide hunger strike, in despair at ever being freed, despite being approved for release, and was force-fed, and in an article in 2010, I explained how, in my book The Guantánamo Files, based on documents publicly released by the Pentagon, I described how he “‘was accused of training at [a] Libyan camp near Kabul,’ but denied that he had ever been in Afghanistan at all, and said that he went to Pakistan ‘with some other people who were acting as missionaries to talk about religion in the villages.'”

I also explained how he was married with a five-year old daughter, and worked for a government ministry, and how, “in a written submission to his tribunal at Guantánamo, his brother, who noted that he had called home regularly from Pakistan, described him as being ‘far from a religious fanatic.'” In contrast, the US authorities were able to allege only that he admitted that he “traveled to Afghanistan, ostensibly for the purpose of getting married, finding work and settling down,” and that he “maintain[ed] that he originally went to Afghanistan to immigrate and not for training.”

As I also explained, “Apart from the allegation about training at the Libyan camp, and two other distinctly dubious allegations — that he had traveled to a guest house from al-Farouq” (an allegation made by an Iraqi prisoner who was victimised by most of his fellow prisoners because he was a Shi’ite Muslim) and that he ‘was identified by a senior al-Qaeda operative as being a Yemeni bodyguard for Osama bin Laden who he saw in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2000′ (an allegation that only appears to have surfaced once in a summary of allegations) — there is no indication that he ever took up arms against anybody, and it is stated explicitly in the government’s evidence that he ‘fled Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.'”

According to the US authorities, he was seized by “Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate (ISID), working in conjunction with US officials [with] 15 others on 7 February 2002 during a raid on [a] safe house” operated by “a senior al-Qaida facilitator,” but that is not necessarily true, as the men seized on that day were apparently seized in a variety of house raids, and not just one, and, in an case, it was by no means certain that the me seized had anything to do with al-Qaeda and were not instead, a collection of individuals fleeing the death and destruction in Afghanistan and simply trying to get home.

Saad al-Azani (ISN 575), also seized in the Karachi raids on February 7, 2002, is also represented by lawyers at Killmer, Lane & Newman in Denver, Colorado, and in the article by Sammie Killmer, one of the lawyers’ daughters, he was described as follows: “He is very religious and studies religion. He is shy and quiet.”

I also wrote about him in 2010, based on documents publicly released by the Pentagon, which I drew on for my description of him in my book The Guantánamo Files, in which I explained that, in Guantánamo, he “stated that he went to Pakistan to train as an imam, after attending a school run by Jamaat-al-Tablighi in Yemen, and ended up undertaking religious training in Kandahar, Afghanistan.” I added, “Unable to come up with any evidence against him, the US authorities resorted to declaring that a request for permission for him to preach Islam in Pakistan ‘was found in a collection of materials related to al-Qaeda,’ that the man who ran the Institute of Islamic Studies, where he studied, was ‘an al-Qaeda operational planner,’ and that the student population ‘consisted primarily of Afghani and Philippine Taliban members.'” The man described as the “al-Qaeda operational planner” was Abu Hafs, a Mauritanian frequently described as al-Qaeda’s spiritual advisor, but what is necessary to know about him is that he opposed the 9/11 attacks.

Emad Hassan (ISN 680) is one of 15 men seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Afghanistan, on March 28, 2002, the same day that another house raid led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah. They mostly claimed that they were students, and ten of them had been released prior to this latest batch of releases, two after having their habeas corpus petitions granted, two at the end of 2014 (a Yemeni and a Palestinian), and two more who were released in Oman in January.

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

As I explained in an article in October 2010 describing the circumstances of the arrest of the 15 men:

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

Hassan, who had been on a hunger strike — and force-fed — since 2007, was represented by lawyers at Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity, who had publicized his plight last February via a letter he had written. In March, he sought to have a judge rule on the legality of his force-feeding, and Clive Stafford Smith provided a detailed account of his long years of force-feeding, and further letters were released in May, when he also sought to have a judge preserve videotapes of his force-feeding — a case that had not been decided on at the time of his release. In August, another letter was released, which I wrote about in an article entitled, “Most of the Hunger Strikers Are Vomiting on the Torture Chairs”: Emad Hassan’s Latest Harrowing Letter from Guantánamo, and in November, as I explained here, two more letters were published in a series on Guantánamo by Vice News.

In the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg explained how Alka Pradhan, a lawyer at Reprieve, stated that Hassan “became a devotee of the ‘Game of Thrones’ series and Dan Brown books” from the prison library.

I wrote about the last of the six, Mohammed al-Zarnuki (ISN 691), who was also seized in the Faisalabad raid, in an article in 2010, in which, again, I drew on documents publicly released by the Pentagon to explain how “it was alleged, by unidentified sources, including ‘a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,’ that al-Zarnuki was seen in various training camps and guest houses in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2001 (and even that, after the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, he attended a meeting in Kandahar with Osama bin Laden to plan further operations),” whereas al-Zarnuki himself “stated that he took a break from farming to preach with Jamaat-al-Tablighi,” and “claimed that he spent four months preaching and then spent a month and a half at the guest house where he was seized, where he became ill.”

The allegations against him, as revealed when WikiLeaks released classified US files in 2011, were made by unreliable witnesses like Mustafa al-Hawsawi, one of those accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, who was held and tortured for years in secret CIA prisons as a “high-value detainee.” Other alleged witnesses included the “high-value detainees” Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, and, again, Abu Zubaydah.

In the Washington Post‘s report on the men’s release, Adam Goldman and Missy Ryan noted that, according to the files released by WikiLeaks, some of those released “served as bodyguards to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” or “were described as seasoned militants who traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to take part in militant activities.”

In an important passage, however, Goldman and Ryan added that “senior US officials have cautioned those files were later scrubbed and re-evaluated under the Obama administration,” and that “[s]ome of the information they contained was discredited.” For “some,” read “most,” and you’ll be close to understanding quite how worthless most of the information masquerading as evidence in the files released by WikiLeaks actually is.

A former US official, speaking anonymously, also encouraged the Obama administration to keep releasing prisoners. The administration “should be making progress ‘every month’ in resettling prisoners who have been approved for transfer.” the official said, adding, “Any month that goes by without a transfer is undermining the president’s policy, and is unfair to the individuals involved.”

I couldn’t agree more, and I hope to see more releases as soon as possible.

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.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009 (out of the 532 released by President Bush), and the 115 prisoners released from February 2009 to January 2015 (by President Obama), whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files, and for the stories of the other 390 prisoners released by President Bush, see my archive of articles based on the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; 1 Mauritanian; 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; 13 Afghans (here and here); 3 British residents; 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; 2 Algerians; 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan), repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 —1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani); 4 Uighurs to Bermuda; 1 Iraqi; 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad); 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni; 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); 2 Somalis; 4 Afghans; 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 1 Uzbek to Switzerland; 1 Egyptian, 1 Azerbaijani and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia; February 2010 — 1 Egyptian, 1 Libyan, 1 Tunisian to Albania; 1 Palestinian to Spain; March 2010 — 1 Libyan, 2 unidentified prisoners to Georgia, 2 Uighurs to Switzerland; May 2010 — 1 Syrian to Bulgaria, 1 Yemeni to Spain; July 2010 — 1 Yemeni (Mohammed Hassan Odaini); 1 Algerian; 1 Syrian to Cape Verde, 1 Uzbek to Latvia, 1 unidentified Afghan to Spain; September 2010 — 1 Palestinian, 1 Syrian to Germany; January 2011 — 1 Algerian; April 2012 — 2 Uighurs to El Salvador; July 2012 — 1 Sudanese; September 2012 — 1 Canadian (Omar Khadr) to ongoing imprisonment in Canada; August 2013 — 2 Algerians; December 2013 — 2 Algerians; 2 Saudis; 2 Sudanese; 3 Uighurs to Slovakia; March 2014 — 1 Algerian (Ahmed Belbacha); May 2014 — 5 Afghans to Qatar (in a prisoner swap for US PoW Bowe Bergdahl); November 2014 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fawzi al-Odah); 3 Yemenis to Georgia, 1 Yemeni and 1 Tunisian to Slovakia, and 1 Saudi; December 2014 — 4 Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian to Uruguay; 4 Afghans; 2 Tunisians and 3 Yemenis to Kazakhstan; January 2015 — 4 Yemenis to Oman, 1 Yemeni to Estonia.

Remembering the Season of Death at Guantánamo

On June 9, Joseph Hickman, a former guard at Guantánamo, posted the following tweet: “9 years ago today I was at Guantánamo Bay. Three detainees were murdered while I was on duty. All should remember those three men today.”

It was a poignant message, and a reminder of how, at Guantánamo, the years may pass but the injustices — horrible injustices involving unexplained deaths, torture and indefinite detention without charge or trial — remain or are inadequately addressed.

On June 9, 2006, as Joe Hickman pointed out, three prisoners died at Guantánamo — 37-year old Salah Ahmed al-Salami (aka Ali al-Salami), a Yemeni, 30-year old Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, a Saudi, and 22-year old Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, another Saudi, who was just 17 years old when he was seized in Afghanistan at the end of 2001. The Bush administration claimed that they died in a suicide pact, by hanging themselves, but that always seemed unlikely. How were men who were scrutinized incessantly supposed to get the materials to hang themselves and then do so without anyone noticing? And could it really not be relevant that all three men had been long-term hunger strikers, and a thorn in the side of the authorities at Guantánamo?

I wrote regularly about the men who died in June 2006 — on the second anniversary of their death, when no one in the mainstream media noticed, and in August 2008, after an official and unsatisfactory statement based on the NCIS investigation of the men’s death was released  — and then, in January 2010, came a dark and powerful revelation: “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides,'” an article in Harper’s Magazine by the law professor and journalist Scott Horton, based on interviews with former guards, including, in particular, Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, who had been in charge of the guard towers on the night the men died, and who swore that the official story could not have been true. My immediate response to Horton’s article is here.

Hickman observed vans coming and going on the night in question, which, he thought, had taken the three men to another location — a secret site he and his colleagues identified as “Camp No” — where, he thought, some sort of torture session had gone wrong, and they had died. They were then returned to the main camp, where the suicide story was swiftly concocted by the authorities.

Two compelling facts also emerged to cast doubts on the official narrative: the men who died all had rags stuffed down their throats, which would have been impossible for them to do themselves — and was a detail that was suppressed in official reports — and another prisoner, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, who is still held despite having been approved for release in 2007 and 2009, said that, on the night of the men’s deaths, he too was subjected to horrible abuse, and thought that he would die.

Scott Horton was eventually awarded a prize for his story, but it never led to an official inquiry. I and others continued to raise it over the years — in June 2010, I wrote Murders at Guantánamo: The Cover-Up Continues, in June 2011 I promoted the work of Jeff Kaye relating to the men’s deaths, in June 2013 I first coined the phrase “The Season of Death at Guantánamo,” and in June 2014 I covered additional information covered by Scott Horton.

However, it was not until January this year that it resurfaced in a notable manner when Joe Hickman’s account was published as a book, Murder at Camp Delta, which I spoke about in a radio show at the time, and mentioned here.

Below I’m making available the interview that Joe Hickman did with Jason Leopold of Vice News when his book was published, and check out Jason’s article, How Guantánamo Became America’s Interrogation ‘Battle Lab’, which looks at the book’s closing chapter, and its suggestions that Guantánamo was “the ideal long-term interrogation facility, a ‘battle lab’ where detainees would be subjected to untested interrogation methods and ‘exploited’ for their intelligence value in what turned out to be a massive ‘experiment.'” This was based on a report by the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, where Hickman now works — and is just one of many important reports produced since 2006.

Please also see the coverage on Democracy Now! and an article in Newsweek.

The other deaths

The three deaths in June 2006 are not the only suspicious deaths to have taken place in the “season of death.” My very first articles, in May/June 2007, were written in response to the alleged death by suicide, on May 30, 2007, of a Saudi prisoner, Abdul Rahman al-Amri. Former prisoner Omar Deghayes later told me that al-Amri had been profoundly upset by the sexual harassment at Guantánamo — enough, perhaps, to lead him to take his own life — but Jeff Kaye (psychologist and journalist) later looked into the investigation into his death and found another murky story, as he did for Muhammad Salih (aka Mohammed al-Hanashi), another long-term hunger striker and agitator who died on June 1, 2009.

The sixth death in this period came on May 22, 2011, when Hajji Nassim (an Afghan known in Guantánamo — and only in Guantánamo — as Inayatullah), who was a prisoner with profound mental health issues, and was also a case of mistaken identity, committed suicide. In his case there is no reason to suspect foul play, but it is disturbing and disgraceful that a profoundly troubled man, who was not who the authorities pretended he was, died instead of being released.

That is also true of Abdul Latif, a Yemeni with mental health problems, repeatedly cleared for release, who died outside of the “season of death,” in September 2012, and it is also worth remembering the other deaths — Abdul Razaq Hekmati, a profound case of mistaken identity, who died of cancer in December 2007, and Awal Gul, an Afghan who died after taking exercise in February 2011.

It is, I think, rather bleakly remarkable that no one has died at Guantánamo since September 2012, but as the men age, and their ailments multiply, it must be the case that there is little room for complacency at the prison these days. One very ill man still held is Tariq al-Sawah, an obese Egyptian who was approved for release in February by a Periodic Review Board, and, in addition, an independent expert who was allowed to visit Shaker Aamer in December 2013 concluded that he has a host of physical and psychological problems and should be freed. The safest way forward for the administration would be to release the men approved for release — 51 of the remaining 116 men now held, including al-Sawah and Shaker Aamer — as swiftly as possible, and to review the cases of the others (all but the handful of men facing trials) to ascertain if there is any good reason why they too should not be released before they, in turn, become grim statistics at a prison that should never have existed.

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.