Andy Worthington's Blog, page 95

Photos: London Protests Against the Tories and Austerity

See my photo set on Flickr here!

Since the Tories got back into power, without even needing the Lib Dems for a coalition, thanks to the unfairness of the “first past the post” voting system, the largely corrupt and biased British media and the propensity of voters outside Scotland to vote Tory (and UKIP) in slightly larger numbers than Labour and the Green Party, it is obvious that any of us who care about society, community, the welfare state, the NHS, social housing, the working class, the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, Muslims and immigrants have a huge fight on our hands for the next five years — unless, as is to be hoped, the Tories manage to tear themselves apart.

I confess that I was reassured that, the moment it became obvious that, with the support of just 24.4% of the electorate and 36.9% of those who voted, the Tories had managed to secure 50.8% of the seats in the General Election on May 7, spontaneous protests took place in London and Cardiff.

I think we need to be on the streets as much as possible, to show our discontent, and to remind ourselves that we are not alone, and I hope that the national anti-austerity protest in London on June 20, organised by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, will be as big as possible. The Facebook page is here.

In the meantime, I’ve been to a few recent protests — the People’s Assembly Against Austerity held a protest opposite 10 Downing Street on Wednesday May 27, the day of the State Opening of Parliament, at which I saw John Rees, one of the founders of the People’s Assembly, address the crowd. Another of the speakers was Jeremy Corbyn MP (Labour, Islington North), who said, “Keep the spirit of that world you want to live in — not the nasty divided one we’re in.”

On Saturday May 30, other protests took place. My first stop was Trafalgar Square, where the PCS (Public and Commercial Services Union) was highlighting the strike by staff at the National Gallery, who are fighting to save their jobs against management’s plans to privatise 400 of the 600 PCS jobs at the gallery. The protest came during a ten-day strike, following 24 days of strikes since February, and those on strike are also calling for the reinstatement of PCS representative Candy Udwin, a tenacious activist who has been sacked.

I caught a powerful speech by PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka who said, “The National Gallery is a much-loved institution and it must be stopped from damaging its own reputation. It must halt this pointless privatisation and reinstate staff member and PCS rep Candy Udwin immediately. This could be the future for all of us unless we act now. As a new Tory government announces its intention to pass a union-busting bill, it is vital that this rally is also a mass protest against victimisation and attacks on our rights.”

I then made my way down Whitehall to another protest opposite 10 Downing Street,  this one aimed primarily at defending the Human Rights Act against theTories’ vile plans to scrap it — plans which, as I explained in a detailed article here, would need us to leave the Council of Europe and the European Union if they are to be realised — as well as leaving us in a club of two in Europe, with the dictatorship Belarus, of countries that have turned their backs on human rights legislation.

The event was called The Great British Right Off! – Protest for the Human Rights Act, and the Facebook page explained that it involved “young trade unionists, students, the disabled and other campaigners and activists who strive for social justice and equality.”

At the protest, where I spent some time catching up on events with Labour campaigner Jos Bell, who I got to know when we were both campaigning to save Lewisham Hospital in 2012-13, I also met up with my son Tyler and his friends — including Louis Sills-Clare, the bassist in my band The Four Fathers — who had started their day at Waterloo where UK Uncut had also organised a protest. This involved activists hanging a 20-metre banner over the side of Westminster Bridge facing Parliament which read, “£12bn more cuts. £120bn tax dodged. Austerity is a lie.”

I’m glad that I managed to take photos of Tyler and Louis, as representatives of young people unwilling to although I concede that mine couldn’t compete with those taken for Vice Magazine, which I encourage you to have a look at.

So a final reminder: if you’re in London — or wiling to travel from elsewhere — I hope to see you a week on Saturday, June 20, for the huge anti-austerity march organised by the People’s Assembly Against Austerity. We meet at the Bank of England, and start marching at noon, ending up at Parliament Square.

As the organisers explain on Facebook, where 64,000 people have already said they are going:

With the Tories going it alone in government we know exactly what to expect. More nasty, destructive cuts to the things ordinary people care about- the NHS, the welfare state, education and public services.

We’ll be assembling the demonstration in the heart of the City of London right on the doorstep of the very people who created the crisis in the first place, the banks and their friends in Westminster. We demand that the bankers and elite should pay for the crisis and not the vast majority who had nothing to do with it.

Now is the time to get organizing, to mobilize our communities, to prepare transport and spread the word. We need to do all that we can to make this demonstration bigger and bolder than ever we have done before.

See here for details of transport from across the country, and see here for information about the various blocs taking part in the demo.

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.

Quarterly Fundraiser Day 3: Still Hoping to Raise $3000 (£1800) to Support My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

Many of you, I’m sure, are, like me, self-employed — and will therefore understand that life regularly involves not knowing where your next pay check is coming from. For the last six years, I have relied on you to support me with donations — support that enables me to continue my work as an independent journalist, commentator and activist, specializing in Guantánamo and related issues and largely working online.

This is a modern story — only made possible through the internet, through blogging technology, and through your generosity, funding people you appreciate as an alternative to the old models of the mainstream media and payment derived from advertising and sales.

Since I launched my latest fundraiser on Monday, things have been moving slowly, I have to say. Earlier today, I had my fourth donation, but back in March, for example, over 30 people donated. Today’s supporter apologized for only being able to give $20 (£12), but no apology was required. Every donation — however large or small — is very generous, and, in addition, if everyone who reads my work and supports my campaigning gave me $20 — that’s just $1.50 or £1 a week for the next three months — I could wrap up this fundraiser now!

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

All contributions to support my work are welcome, whether it’s $25, $100 or $500 — or, of course, the equivalent in pounds sterling or any other currency. You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated. 

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

I do hope that, if you support my work, and are able to make a small donation to keep me going — as noted above, even just $1.50 or £1 a week — you will do so.

With thanks, as always, for your interest in my work.

Andy Worthington

London

June 10, 2015

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

New York Times Publishes British MPs’ Hard-Hitting Op-Ed Calling for Shaker Aamer’s Release from 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.

Regular readers of “Close Guantánamo” will be aware of the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Shaker, a Saudi national who was given indefinite leave to remain in the UK, has a British wife and four British children, and is still held despite being approved for release under President Bush in 2007 and under President Obama in 2010.

I wrote about Shaker’s case soon after the “Close Guantánamo” campaign and website was established, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo in January 2012. To mark the 10th anniversary of Shaker’s arrival at  Guantánamo, on February 14, 2012, I wrote an article entitled, 10 Years in Guantánamo: British Resident Shaker Aamer, Cleared for Release But Still Held.

One of his lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, then made available notes of his meetings with Shaker, which we published as two articles in April 2012, and again in October 2012, at Shaker’s request. In October 2013, we published an exclusive article about Shaker’s request for an independent medical evaluation, and also published Ramzi Kassem’s supporting statement, and in April 2014, after that medical evaluation had been allowed, we followed up with an article about Shaker’s ultimately unsuccessful request for a judge to order his release because of the findings by the expert, Dr. Emily Keram, that Shaker was suffering from a host of physical and psychological problems.

In November 2014, we also covered the launch of a new campaign, We Stand With Shaker, co-founded by Andy Worthington — with the activist Joanne MacInnes. The centerpiece of the campaign is a giant inflatable figure of Shaker, which proved to be one of those gimmicks that grabs the public’s attention. Over 70 MPs and celebrities (including writers, actors, musicians and comedians) have, to date, stood with the giant inflatable figure, and the campaign has been picked up on, and supported by prominent British media outlets including the Daily Mail.

In March, the newly-convened cross-party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group secured the government’s backing for a motion calling for Shaker’s release and return to the UK, and last month four MPs visited Washington D.C. to repeat that call, meeting with Senators including John McCain and Dianne Feinstein, and Obama administration officials.

Despite being well-received, the MPs evidently felt that not enough has been done to secure Shaker’s release, and so, in yesterday’s New York Times, they had a hard-hitting op-ed published, entitled “Obama’s Slap in Britain’s Face,” in which they write that, although they are “unlikely political bedfellows from the left and right of British politics,” who “agree on almost nothing,” they are united in their demand for Shaker’s immediate release and return to the UK.

The MPs noted in particular that, although they heard during their visit that “Congress has prevented transfers,” it was clear that, “under current legislation, Mr. Obama could give notice to Congress and then transfer Mr. Aamer 30 days later, as the British government has requested.” The MPs also noted that they heard that there may be “security considerations” regarding Shaker’s release, to which they responded, “Any suggestion that Britain does not have the legal structures, the security and intelligence skills, or the care capacity to address any issues with Mr. Aamer is deeply insulting.”

Noting also that “[t]here is simply no reason, domestic or international, for the United States to keep Mr. Aamer in custody,” the MPs concluded, “It is difficult for us to shake off the depressing notion that the Obama administration is indifferent to the repeated requests of the British government,” adding that this is “a slap in the face for America’s staunchest friend.”

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we wholeheartedly agree with the MPs, and hope that their op-ed leads to action to confirm, as we have been hearing suggested over the last few months, that Shaker will be freed soon. Below, we’re posting the MPs’ op-ed in its entirety.

Obama’s Slap in Britain’s Face

By Jeremy Corbyn, David Davis, Andrew Mitchell and Andy Slaughter, New York Times, June 8, 2015

Two weeks ago, we went to Washington to argue for the immediate release of Shaker Aamer, a detainee at Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Aamer’s wife and four children live in London but he has yet to meet his youngest child, Faris, who is now 13.

We are unlikely political bedfellows from the left and right of British politics. The four of us agree on almost nothing, with this exception: Mr. Aamer, a British permanent resident, must be freed and transferred to British soil immediately.

Mr. Aamer was picked up by the Northern Alliance in November 2001 in Afghanistan, where he was doing charity work, and sold for a bounty. He was taken to the notorious Bagram Prison, where he was brutally tortured, before being sent to Guantánamo in February 2002. In 2007, under President George W. Bush’s administration, he was cleared for release. In 2010, under President Obama, he was cleared for release again — after an arduous process requiring unanimous agreement by six agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Departments of State and Defense.

We should never have had to make the trip to Washington. Earlier this year, during his visit to the United States, Prime Minister David Cameron asked Mr. Obama to release Mr. Aamer. The president promised to pursue the matter. On March 17, the House of Commons passed an unusual unanimous motion calling for Mr. Aamer’s immediate release and transfer to Britain. Since that time little, if anything, has been done by the United States.

We heard during our visit that “Congress has prevented transfers”; yet, under current legislation, Mr. Obama could give notice to Congress and then transfer Mr. Aamer 30 days later, as the British government has requested. We heard that there may be “security considerations.” Any suggestion that Britain does not have the legal structures, the security and intelligence skills, or the care capacity to address any issues with Mr. Aamer is deeply insulting.

We are, after all, America’s most trusted ally, and have stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States, expending our blood and treasure, in two controversial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our troops are deployed together in our joint determination to defeat fundamentalist terrorism. Our government, from the prime minister on down, would not press this case with such determination if we believed that Mr. Aamer would put either our allies or our own citizens at risk.

We came to Washington to meet with Obama administration officials and senators to express the British Parliament’s anger that after twice being cleared for transfer, Mr. Aamer is nevertheless facing his 14th year of detention. We were astonished to find a similar degree of incomprehension among the senators we met from both parties. Though we appreciated their concern, their lack of knowledge about Mr. Aamer’s case indicates a troubling failure by the White House to communicate the importance of it.

Our impressions were confirmed during meetings with the president’s special envoys for the closure of Guantánamo. Although almost five months have passed since Mr. Cameron’s request to Mr. Obama, the Defense Department’s special envoy, Paul M. Lewis, and the State Department’s acting special envoy, Charles Trumbull, were unable to adequately answer our questions regarding a timeline for Mr. Aamer’s transfer.

This is a particularly unforgivable omission in Mr. Aamer’s case because he has never been charged with anything, has been twice cleared for transfer, and is suffering from ill health. Over a decade in Guantánamo would be a long punishment for any crime, if one had actually been committed. Fifteen other British detainees have recently been returned to us and none have been guilty of recidivism. Indeed, while our request for Mr. Aamer’s return has not yet been granted, the American government has seen fit to pay for the transfer of other detainees to Kazakhstan and Uruguay — neither of which has a security or care structure equal to Britain’s. There is simply no reason, domestic or international, for the United States to keep Mr. Aamer in custody.

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

These things matter in the war against terrorism. All four of us are senior members of Parliament who represent minority and Muslim communities in our constituencies. The scourge of terrorism will never be defeated unless we can win the hearts and minds of those who might be receptive to the terrorists’ message. And respect for justice and for the rule of law is essential in that battle.

Jeremy Corbyn and Andy Slaughter are Labour members, and David Davis and Andrew Mitchell are Conservative members, of the British Parliament.

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.

My Quarterly Fundraising Campaign: Seeking $3500 to Support My Guantánamo Work

Please support my work!

Dear friends and supporters,

Every three months I ask you, if you can, to support my work on Guantánamo by making a donation to support my work. I have been researching and writing about Guantánamo for over nine years, and I have been writing articles on an almost daily basis, and campaigning to get the prison closed, for just over eight years, beginning with a blog post I wrote on May 31, 2007, after a Saudi prisoner died, reportedly by committing suicide. In all this time, most of my work has been unpaid — and is only possible because of the support I receive from you.

If you support my work as a genuinely independent voice, unafraid to combine hard-hitting journalism with activism, and if you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to donate via PayPal (and I should add that you don’t need to be a PayPal member to use PayPal).

All contributions to support my work are welcome, whether it’s $25, $100 or $500 — or, of course, the equivalent in pounds sterling or any other currency. You can also make a recurring payment on a monthly basis by ticking the box marked, “Make This Recurring (Monthly),” and if you are able to do so, it would be very much appreciated.

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

Since my last fundraiser, in March, when over 30 of you helped me to reach my quarterly target, I have, of course, continued to work towards the closure of Guantánamo, drafting an open letter to President Obama and defense secretary Ashton Carter, on behalf of 13 rights groups, and publishing around 50 articles, in which I have tried to keep readers up to date on Guantánamo in general, as well as focusing in particular on the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, though the We Stand With Shaker campaign that I launched with an activist friend, Joanne MacInnes, in November.

Our campaigning — for which we have no funding — helped to secure a Parliamentary debate on Shaker in March, in which the British government endorsed a motion calling for his release from Guantánamo and his return to the UK, and also contributed to the success of a fundraising appeal to pay for a delegation of four MPs to visit the US last month to meet with Senators and Obama administration officials to discuss Shaker’s release. We also recently published the 70th photo of celebrities and MPs standing with the giant inflatable figure of Shaker that is at the heart of the campaign, and that has done so much to raise awareness of Shaker’s plight.

I probably don’t need to remind you that my work also involves radio interviews, occasional TV appearances, and a variety of other personal appearances, as well as all the emails and admin that take place behind the scenes, and that almost all of this is not paid for, and is only possible because of your support.

For the first time since I began fundraising six years ago, I have raised the amount I am hoping to receive to $3500 a quarter from $2500. That’s still less than $270 (£170) a week for my constant advocacy on behalf of the men still held, and my unfailing support for the closure of Guantánamo once and for all, and I hope you recognize it as good value for money.

As ever, it’s true to say that I couldn’t do what I do without your support.

Andy Worthington

London

June 8, 2015

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

Omar Khadr Speaks: Major Profile of Former Guantánamo Prisoner in the Toronto Star

For nine years, I’ve been following the story of Omar Khadr, the former child prisoner at Guantánamo, who was released on bail in Canada a month ago. I first wrote about Omar in my book The Guantánamo Files, which I wrote in 2006-07, and since then I’ve written 94 articles about him, watching as he was first put forward for a trial by military commission in June 2007, shortly after I started writing articles about Guantánamo on an almost daily basis, and writing a major profile of him in November 2007.

In 2008, I followed his pre-trial hearings in the military commissions (see here and here, for example), and watched in horror as videos of his profoundly insensitive interrogations by Canadian agents were released, and in October 2008 I wrote a detailed article about him based on the Bush administration’s refusal to recognize the rights of juvenile prisoners.

I then wrote about the Obama administration’s lamentable decision to charge Omar — again — in the revived military commissions, and watched as the pre-trial hearings unfolded, leading to one of the bleakest moments in the Obama presidency — the plea deal Omar agreed to, in order to leave Guantánamo, in which, to his eternal shame, President Obama allowed a former child to be prosecuted, in a war crimes trial, not for war crimes, but for having engaged in armed conflict with US soldiers during a war — something that has never been a war crime and never will be.

Omar’s plea deal — in which he confessed to throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier, even though this is severely in doubt — led to him receiving an eight-year sentence, with one more year to be served in Guantánamo, and the rest in Canada.

It took nearly two years for the heel-dragging Canadian government to bring Omar home, and the government then did all in their power to keep him locked away in a maximum-security prison, even though Omar had never been a difficult prisoner, and even though there were compelling reasons for refusing to accept the plea deal and the military commissions as legitimate.

Omar’s release — on bail, after a successful legal challenge — finally allowed people to see him as the sensitive, thoughtful young man he has become, which was apparent to those paying attention from as long ago as October 2010, when a Canadian professor, Arlette Zinck, who had been regularly communicating with him, made available some of their exchanges by letter.

Last week, the Toronto Star ran a major feature on Omar, written by Michelle Shephard, who wrote a book about him, Guantánamo’s Child, back in 2008. The article coincided with a documentary aired on CBC, “Omar Khadr: Out of the Shadows,” and I’m cross-posting it below, as Michelle spent two days with Omar, at the home of his lawyer Dennis Edney and Dennis’s wife Pat, where he is living as part of his bail conditions, and her article helps to shed light on who Omar is, now that he is free.

Omar Khadr: In His Own Words

By Michelle Shephard, Toronto Star, May 27, 2015

EDMONTON – Omar Khadr is standing in his bedroom looking out at the backyard.

It is his second morning of freedom after nearly 13 years behind bars, and he’s embarrassed because he doesn’t know how to open the window.

“Oh there we go. Well that will come in handy,” he says as he’s shown where to lift the latch and fresh air fills the room. “It got hot yesterday. So that’s one of the basic skills I’m going to learn. Is how to open my window.”

Open a window. Open a bank account. Get a driver’s license. Get a library card. There are so many small skills to be learned by a man who has loomed large since he was shot and captured in Afghanistan at the age of 15 – a man who has never been allowed to speak publicly.

For the first time since being granted bail earlier this month, Khadr spoke over two days in exclusive interviews for the Toronto Star and a documentary that [aired] Thursday on the CBC.

Until now Khadr has existed in caricature drawn and defined by others: victim, killer, child, detainee, political pawn, terrorist, pacifist; he has been compared both to South African freedom fighter Nelson Mandela and serial murderer Paul Bernardo.

He has been prosecuted by the Bush and Obama administrations, interrogated by Canadian intelligence agents while the Liberals were in power, vilified by the Conservative government and defended as a child soldier by prominent figures such as retired Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire and peace activist Desmond Tutu.

When Khadr, now 28, briefly answered journalists’ questions after his release on May 7, he appeared calm and humble, was articulate, spoke with a slight Canadian accent and smiled constantly.

How?

Raised in what was once called “Canada’s First Family of Terrorism,” shuttled as a boy between Scarborough and Jalalabad, shot, captured, tortured and imprisoned. How did he walk away unscathed?

Khadr insists the serene persona is genuine. This is him.

“People are just going to think I’m fake,” he says. “You know, you go through a struggle, you go through a trauma, you’re going to be bitter, you’re going to hate some people, it’s just the normal thing to do and this guy not having these natural emotions is probably hiding something.”

During his first few days of freedom, he seems a little mystified at times by the choices he now has. Someone has dropped off cupcakes and he wonders aloud if he can eat one for breakfast.

He jokes often, apologizes if he keeps us waiting, even though he is uncomfortable in the spotlight. He repeatedly thanks Patricia Edney, wife of his longtime lawyer Dennis Edney, and accepts hugs from her and lessons in the kitchen.

Khadr is living with the Edneys while on bail. They’re a close couple and demonstrative with their two sons and two dogs; Khadr seems to be right at home.

Gone is the teenaged Khadr who often looked sullen and forlorn during his Guantanamo hearings years ago. He comes across confident, stubborn at times, although he says he often feels insecure and scares easily.

Khadr only reluctantly agreed to tell his side of the story. He would rather prove that he is not the man Prime Minister Stephen Harper believes him to be.

“I don’t wish people to love me. I don’t wish people to hate me. I just wish for people to give me a chance,” he says.

His greatest wish is one not likely to be granted — at least not any time soon.

“I wish that I could get out of prison and just be the next Joe on the street who nobody knows and who nobody gives a second look or thought to. That would be my ideal life.”

“It’s like it happened to someone else”

When Khadr talks about his past, he says he feels emotionally detached as he remembers the 2002 firefight in Afghanistan during which an American soldier was fatally wounded, the days of interrogations at the U.S. prison in Bagram, or his decade in Guantánamo, where he was once used as a human mop after he urinated on himself.

At Bagram, the U.S. military base in Afghanistan where many detainees were interrogated before their transfer to Guantánamo, little was off limits in the treatment of detainees, according to Damien Corsetti, an American military interrogator nicknamed the “Monster.”

“They told us everything we were doing was within the law,” Corsetti said in 2013 when he was interviewed in the southern U.S. town where he has lived since leaving the military.

Some of the “enhanced interrogations techniques” included forced nudity, leaving prisoners hanging by their shackled wrists and pouring water over their hooded faces, Corsetti said.

Meeting Khadr in Bagram was a turning point for Corsetti. He says he looked at Khadr and for the first time wondered if the war was just, when a child “gets wrapped up in something like this. It was through Omar’s injustice that definitely I started to see the errors of my ways.”

Khadr struggles when he talks about his treatment in Bagram; he would rather leave the past to the past.

“To a large degree it’s like it happened to someone else. It’s not a nice place. I wouldn’t wish it on the worst of my enemies,” he says.

He insists he is not bitter about what happened there — or later in Guantánamo.

“I believe that each person, each human being, is capable of doing great harms or great good,” Khadr says. “People who did these bad things are not any different than any one of us.

“Even for people who tortured. There are a lot of people who came back and regretted what they did, so as along as a person is alive there is still hope for him that he’s going to change.”

During the early years at Bagram, where he turned 16, and at Guantánamo, he was “all over the place emotionally and ideologically.”

“I was just a mess. I would be around a bunch of people, I would start acting like them and talking like them, just doing everything they were doing, and then they’d move me to a different (part of the prison) and I’d just adapt.”

But Khadr said he made a conscious decision to think on his own and was influenced not just by detainees, but also by some of the guards, his American lawyers, his Canadian legal team of Edney and Nathan Whitling, psychologists and eventually people like Arlette Zinck, an Edmonton professor who visited him in Guantánamo.

And he learned how to cope, learned how to control his emotions — the only part of his life he had the power to control.

“It would be nice to cry without having to think about crying. Just do your thing and don’t think about it. Don’t try to rationalize it or understand why it is. You know, if you feel it, just express it,” he says.

“I’ve been living in prison for 12 years or 13 years and I’ve been carrying myself in a particular way for that long and it’s going to take some — hopefully not too long — it’s going take some time to kind of ease up and let that guard down.”

Edney and Patricia are taking it slow, making sure Khadr feels part of their family.

On his first day of freedom, Patricia took him shopping. Khadr couldn’t believe the price of socks. The Apple store overwhelmed and excited him. While trying to find toiletries and a Mother’s Day card for Patricia he froze.

“I freaked out for a moment,” he admits. “I tried to buy something and I just freaked out because I don’t know how to deal with money and the prices and everything just seems so expensive.”

“I have memories but I don’t know if they’re mine”

Did Omar Khadr, when he was 15, throw the grenade that fatally wounded U.S. Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer in Afghanistan?

Forget for a moment the larger legal questions as to whether killing a soldier during a firefight is a war crime, or why Khadr is the only person to have been charged with this offence in modern history.

Forget that he was only 15.

To many, including Speer’s widow Tabitha, who has launched a $134-million dollar lawsuit against Khadr in the U.S., the question of who threw the grenade remains important.

In 2010, as part of a plea deal, Khadr told a Guantánamo jury he threw the grenade. When he returned to Canada, he recanted.

His short answer now: “I don’t know.”

We are sitting in the living room of the Edney’s home in an affluent Edmonton suburb. The dogs, Jasper and Molly, are in the backyard so as to not interfere with the interview.

Throughout the day, flowers are delivered, neighbours arrive with baked goods and there are supportive calls: strangers, a senator, lawyers and friends of the Edneys. Two police officers knock at the door: “Hello. I’m Jason, very nice to meet you. This is my partner Sarah. We just wanted to say welcome … we do hope to work with ya and we wish you all the most success that you can possibly have and that I hope things go well.”

To call his introduction to the neighbourhood warm would be an understatement.

Little surprise that Khadr would rather stay in the present, and reluctantly returns to the firefight on July 27, 2002.

For years, Khadr believed he had killed Speer. Then accounts emerged that challenged the Pentagon’s official version, evidence that there may have been two people alive inside the compound when the grenade that fatally wounded Speer was thrown, not just Khadr. Photos showed Khadr buried beneath rubble, which his attorneys say proves he could not have thrown the grenade.

Since Khadr signed a plea deal, the evidence was never challenged. Khadr says he only signed the deal because his lawyers advised it was his only way out of Guantánamo.

“I have memories but I don’t know if they’re mine, if they are accurate or not,” Khadr says. “I lost consciousness for over a week … Is my memory more accurate than a soldier that was actually there?”

Khadr was in the compound that day acting as a translator for three Arab men connected to the Taliban.

The owner of the compound had warned them that the Americans were coming and Khadr says he was ordered to guard a door.

“I was standing there and something just exploded beside me … I got tossed, I don’t know, two, three metres back, and I got up and that’s when I lost my left eye and my right eye was pretty badly damaged.”

He says his vision and memories were foggy after that but he recalls the men dragging him to another location and giving him a grenade and a gun.

As the U.S. Special Forces attacked the compound from the ground, Apache helicopters, A-10 Warthog fighter jets and F-18s pounded the site from the air.

Khadr said it got quiet and he started hearing American voices. “They were screaming, shouting and stuff, I got scared. I was thinking ‘What should I do?’ I didn’t know what to do, so I thought I’m just going to throw this grenade and maybe scare them away … It was the only thing I had and I didn’t know what to do so I lobbed the grenade behind me.”

The grenade exploded. More shooting. Khadr was hit in the back at least twice, holes the size of pop cans in his chest where the bullets exited. He was pulled from under the debris and dragged from the compound, treated by an American medic and taken to Bagram.

“(As) I became conscious in the hospital, a soldier would come and scream at me and tell me that I killed an American soldier and they would tie me up to the bed … they tried to make that as painful as possible.”

“For the longest time I thought that’s what happened; whether it did or not, I don’t know. I always hold to the hope that, you know, maybe my memories were not true.”

The Star tracked down and interviewed six of the U.S. Special Forces who were involved in the firefight and all confirmed that no one saw Khadr until after he was shot.

“Could the other one have thrown the grenade that killed Chris Speer?” asks one of Speer’s fellow soldiers, who agreed to appear on camera during a 2013 interview, but asked that his name not be used. “From my perspective, yeah, it could’ve been. Do I care? Not really because they’re both combatants at this point, they’re both willing to fight, and they’re both willing to kill.”

But it matters to Khadr.

“Of course it does, because on one side, I killed another person and on the other side, I didn’t. So it does make a huge difference.”

“I have a million other influences”

Khadr may have a new home now with the Edneys, but he is still a Khadr, a name that can elicit a fierce reaction.

Some blame his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, who was a humanitarian worker with alliances to Al Qaeda’s elite, for sending his 15-year-old to fight his war.

Shortly after Pakistani forces killed Khadr’s father in 2003, comments by his sister Zaynab and mother Maha Elsamnah in a CBC documentary enraged Canadians. “You would like me to raise my child in Canada and by the time he’s 12 or 13 he’ll be on drugs or having some homosexual relation or this and that?” Elsamnah answered when asked about moving her Canadian children to Afghanistan.

Khadr’s bail conditions restrict his access to his family now — phone calls must be supervised and in-person visits approved by his bail officer.

“They have said things that was not very smart — that they shouldn’t have said. They’re very opinionated,” Khadr says of his family. “I think that they are good people. (But) they haven’t been able to deal with the past and the present. They’re really struggling. Some of my siblings have completely cut off their pasts and some of them are living in the past and not accepting the present.”

He doesn’t believe his father was Al Qaeda, despite his friendship with some of its members. And while the comments made by his mother and sister may have influenced his case, or the Canadian government’s reaction, he says he doesn’t blame them.

“I disagree with a lot of things that they said — and I know some of the things that they said might have affected me or affected the Canadians’ perception of me — but you know, we live in a free country and people are entitled to say whatever they want. I’ve been in Guantanamo for 10 years, and if there is any place where I was going to be brainwashed (it) was in Guantanamo,” says Khadr.

“I have a million other influences, so don’t think people should worry about my family. If anybody is going to be affected, I think they might be affected by me and not the other way around. I hope so, anyways.”

“You come and remind of what I don’t have”

There were only a few moments during the time we spent with Khadr when he grew tense or showed signs of his prison life.

He says he wasn’t worried when the police came to the door — yet he appeared to panic at first.

On the second night of his freedom, he began to fidget around 9:30 p.m. We were at an Italian restaurant not far from Edney’s home but Khadr was anxious about his 10 p.m. curfew and wanted to get back quickly.

His first bike ride was also a challenge. “I was telling Patricia it’s so weird for me to bike off any path — I don’t know if you guys noticed when I was turning left, she just drove over the grass and I had to wait until the actual pavement came and then I moved,” he said. “I’m so used to living in such a structured environment, you know you’re always on a path … you can’t deviate, you can’t take shortcuts or anything, it’s always very controlled.”

He said he sometimes still feels like a teenager.

“I want to kind of devote a few months for every year that I lost, just to experience these things so I can actually grow,” he says.

On our last afternoon, Edney and Khadr sat in the backyard with the dogs at their feet.

Edney does not call Khadr his son, but he and Patricia treat him like family and the banter is easygoing — jokes about how Khadr’s appetite will bankrupt them, the chores he will have to perform, the abundance of flower arrangements. A few days after we leave, they will take him to their vacation home in British Columbia.

Edney and Khadr’s lives have been intertwined for years, and now it seems that will continue for years to come.

Khadr says he had always been impressed with Edney and Whitling’s dedication to his case, but that Edney’s visits were some of his toughest times in Guantánamo.

“They were very good and they were very hard at the same time,” he says.

“Because, you know, I was in prison, I get adjusted to the life, I know what to expect, I know what’s going to happen and then you come in and kind of remind me what I don’t have.”

Now he says he feels lucky for what he has and even some days, for what he has been through.

“Things happen for a reason and sometimes you have to fall to be able to appreciate standing upright.”

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.

Der Spiegel Publishes Detailed Profile of the Former Guantánamo Prisoners in Uruguay, Struggling to Adapt to a New Life

Ever since it was first announced, over a year ago, that six Guantánamo prisoners would be resettled in Uruguay, I have followed the story closely. Uruguay was a fascinating choice for resettlement, with its humble, left-wing president who had also been a political prisoner, and in December, when the six men were freed, there was considerably more media interest that there usually is when prisoners are released — or, as with the six men freed in December, resettled, because they either couldn’t be repatriated at all (as was the case for one of their number, the last Palestinian at Guantánamo) or they couldn’t be safely repatriated (as was the case for the other five men, four Syrians and a Tunisian).

Since their arrival, however, the six men have had difficulty adapting to their new lives. This is unsurprising, given that they are almost certainly all suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, that they are far from home in a Spanish-speaking country with almost no Muslim population, and, most crucially, that they are separated from their families. I had hoped that their transition to a new life would be smoother, and would have involved them being swiftly reunited with their families, but that has not happened, and instead they have gone public with their dissatisfaction — aimed, it should be noted, primarily at the US government, who, the men believe, is not doing enough for them.

In March, I wrote an article about how the men were struggling to adapt to their new lives, which included a request to the Argentinian government to follow Uruguay’s example and take in more prisoners approved for release from Guantánamo but still held. That request was made by Abu Wa’el Dhiab, one of the Syrians, and a well-known figure in Guantánamo circles, because of his effort, last year, to challenge the US authorities’ force-feeding methods through the US courts.

I was also interviewed by a Uruguayan journalist, Martin Otheguy, and, in April, I brought the men’s stories up to date, in an article entitled, “Former Hunger Striker Abu Wa’el Dhiab and Other Guantánamo Prisoners Freed in Uruguay Discuss Their Problems.”

Since then, four of the six men — the Syrians Abu Wa’el Dhiab, Ali Hussein Shaaban and Omar Abdelhadi Faraj, and the Tunisian Abdul Bin Mohammed El Ouerghi — have aired their complaints again in a dramatic fashion, camping outside the US Embassy and holding a hunger strike to demand better treatment. That protest came to an end a few weeks ago, and in the meantime another detailed profile of the men — or three of them in particular (Dhiab, Faraj and the Palestinian, Mohammed Taha Mattan), as well as other key players, including President Mujica and US envoy Cliff Sloan — was published in Der Spiegel.

I’m cross-posting this below, as it’s a powerful article that I hope will reach a few additional readers via my site. I found that the author, Marian Blasberg, captured well what a bright man Abu Wa’el Dhiab is, but how damaged he is by his experiences, and also captured the openness of Omar Abdelhadi Faraj, as well as providing insights into the solitude experienced by Mohammed Taha Mattan.

Please note that, in the article Abu Wa’el Dhiab was identified as Jihad Diyab, and Omar Abdelhadi Faraj was identified as Abd al-Hadi Omar Faraj.

New Lives in Uruguay: Freedom Elusive after 12 Years at Guantánamo

By Marian Blasberg, Der Spiegel, May 21, 2015

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Six former Guantánamo prisoners have been sharing a house in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo for the last six months. The planned closure of the US detention facility could hinge on the outcome of this experiment.

Jihad Diyab walks with the help of crutches as he steps out of the front door of his new house on Calle Maldonado, a street in Montevideo, Uruguay, 12,000 kilometers (7,456 miles) from his native Syria.

He wants to talk outside, says Diyab. His housemates, a group of Arabs who, like Diyab, were recently released from Guantánamo and are now taking their first steps into freedom in this faraway country, don’t have to hear everything, he says. Diyab hobbles along the sidewalk until he reaches the corner, where he sinks into a plastic chair in front of a corner store. He sets his crutches against the table and leans forward.

“So,” he asks, “how do things look?”

During our first meeting a few days ago, Diyab had set a few conditions under which he would be willing to talk about how he feels, after 12 years in the hell of Guantánamo. He had said he needed a wheelchair, preferably an electric one. He also wanted a laptop, a camera and an iPhone 6, because he was planning to launch a campaign to free the prisoners still detained in that black hole in Cuba. He also said he had relatives who had fled the war in Syria, and that he would talk as soon as Germany could guarantee that they would be treated at Berlin’s university hospital Charité.

Worn By Years in Prison

Diyab has a suspicious look in his eyes. His years in prison have given his face a hard look. His T-shirt hangs loosely over his thin frame. Diyab is only 43, but his beard and his curly hair are already gray. He needs crutches because there are days when he has no sensation in the right side of his body. He believes this has something to do with worms that are eating their way through his stomach, or possibly the blows he received regularly before they forcibly inserted a tube into his nose, which was used to feed him when he refused to eat.

Over the course of eight years, he repeatedly went on hunger strikes in Guantánamo, because the Americans refused to tell what he was being charged with. Diyad was alleged to be part of an al-Qaida cell in Afghanistan, but he was never indicted. He still refused to eat after he was officially declared innocent in 2009, because he could no longer endure the years of waiting to be set free.

“I thought about it,” says Diyab. “Forget what I said. Instead, get me an appointment with Dilma, the president of Brazil. I want to ask her to accept a few of my brothers.”

The other former prisoners had warned us that Diyab was the most complicated man in their group, a loner who hatched strange ideas at night, while lying awake in his bed. What is going through his head, they wondered? Is he establishing rules because others always dictated them in years gone by? Is it about control, or dignity, or does his behavior stem from a feeling that the world owes him something?

No Regrets or Apologies from US

It is the end of March, and the trees in Montevideo are starting to lose their leaves. The men have been here for almost four months, Jihad, the outsider. Ali, who is waiting to have surgery on his right eye, in which he lost his vision after countless electroshocks. Mohammed, who wanted to study physics but can hardly remember two numbers today. The other three are Ahmed, Abdul and Omar, the youngest, who wet his orange jumpsuit on the flight to Uruguay because the guards wouldn’t allow him to use the toilet. Until the plane landed in Montevideo, they were forced to wear black hoods over their heads. When they arrived at the Montevideo airport on Dec. 7, shortly after midnight, they were handed a document that stated that there was “no information to indicate that they were involved in terrorist activities against the United States of America.”

The brief note was signed by Cliff Sloan who, as a special envoy for the US government, searched for countries that would accept detainees released from Guantánamo. The note contained no expression of regret or an apology.

And Uruguay, of all places.

Uruguay is a small country of 3 million people, sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil, on the left lower edge of a map of the world. All it takes to understand that the former prisoners’ old and new homes are worlds apart is to run your finger along the map, across the Atlantic, Africa and the Mediterranean, all the way to the Middle East.

There is not a single mosque in the country, and fewer than 100 Muslims live in the capital city Montevideo. Prior to the arrival of their fellow Muslims from Guantánamo, many had wondered what on earth the men could have possibly been up to when they fell into the hands of the Americans in the Afghan-Pakistani border region after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Tourism? Marveling at the cliffs of Tora Bora? The overwhelming majority of the population was also skeptical. Uruguay has very little experience in taking in refugees. It even lacks a program to reintegrate its own convicts into society when they are released from prison.

Opposition politicians wanted to know why Uruguay, of all places, should be helping to solve US President Barack Obama’s problems. Why should they care that he had declared the closing of the Guantánamo detention center a “national priority?”

Many were astonished that their former president, who had become such a strong critical voice against America’s aberrations, took up the cause of the Guantánamo detainees. José Mujica, a former leftist guerilla, has a reputation for badmouthing the “empire in the north.” He lives on a farm outside the city and drives an old blue VW Beetle. What was he thinking when, during the last few weeks of his term in office, he announced that he, the only South American leader to do so, was willing to offer a home to the Arabs from Guantánamo? And why did there have to be six when even a country like Sweden was only accepting one?

These are the coordinates that mark the beginning of a new freedom for these men: A shared house in a distant country, a small community to which each resident contributes his own trauma. Outside, the men faced a relatively consistent wall of rejection. And then there was this 79-year-old man who had successfully fought for their acceptance but had been out of office since early March.

How can this go well? And what does it mean for the future of Guantánamo?

Jihad: The Troublemaker

After the first four days, which they spent in a hospital, the six men moved into the house on Calle Maldonado, a somewhat dilapidated, two-story building from the late 1800s. The PIT-CNT trade union federation, which Mujica had asked to provide support to the new arrivals, owns the house. Union employees provided a new refrigerator in the kitchen and a computer in the foyer. When they served them ham-and-cheese baguettes on the day of their arrival, they were surprised when the Arabs didn’t touch the food. “Pork!” says Fernando Gambera, the PIT-CNT director of international relations, whose main job is to communicate with other trade unions in South America. “We didn’t think of that.”

In the first few days, journalists were camped out on the sidewalk in front of the house, like wildlife filmmakers tracking down some previously unknown species in the Serengeti. They filmed Mohammed waving from his window and documented Jihad hobbling to the corner store. Journalists also accompanied them the first time they went to the beach, where Ali wrote the words “Viva Libertad” — long live freedom — in the sand with a stick. With their freshly trimmed beards and sunglasses, the men looked like tourists.

Everyone made an effort during those first few days. Neighbors entered the house through the open door to bring the men tea and mint plants. Omar wrote a letter to the Uruguayan people, expressing his deep gratitude to President Mujica. Union officials turned a blind eye when they saw the first telephone bill, which included a charge of more than €3,000 ($3,340) for long-distance calls alone. When one of the men returned from the courtyard shaking because a neighbor’s dog had barked at him when he took out the trash, union official Gambera offered the men psychological counseling, but they refused. The first to test the limits of his new freedom was Jihad. In early February, he took the ferry to Buenos Aires, where he began searching for the relatives of his mother, who was Argentinean. The identification card issued by Uruguay permits him to travel freely in the member states of the Mercosur trading bloc, but the customs official at the port in Buenos Aires advised him to go back to Uruguay instead.

“I sometimes feel as if I have traveled from one prison to the next,” says Jihad, on a morning when he had actually intended to discuss his conditions for an interview once again. He’s sitting in a café and looks depressed, as he stares at a plate of humus for several minutes without touching the food. His parents used to have a restaurant in Damascus, he mumbles, with 100 tables arranged in the shade of enormous trees. He used to spend his afternoons there as a young boy, he says.

A smile darts across his face.

“Mujica,” he says, “promised to bring our families to Uruguay. He said we would be able to live in our own house, but now nothing is happening. Instead, they are cutting off the phone line and saying that Skype is cheaper. Why don’t they have the United States reimburse them for the costs?”

Shortly after their arrival, Jihad submitted an application for family reunification to Uruguayan authorities. It is a right he has as a recognized refugee. He says that he lost a son when fighter jets with Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces bombed his neighborhood. His other three children, he adds, have spent enough time growing up as half-orphans.

“It’s about time,” says Jihad.

When asked what it was like to hear his wife’s voice on the telephone after such a long time, the expression on his face darkens from one moment to the next. “What about the appointment with Dilma? Or perhaps you know a director who would be interested in making my story into a film?”

Jihad is a difficult case. He seems like a man who is pursuing a thousand plans at the same time but doesn’t know where to begin. He seems restless at times, as if he were trying to make up for the last 12 years in only a few weeks. And then there are days when he doesn’t leave his room.

Sitting in a dark corner of the living room, you can hear him, immersed in his prayers, which take longer than with the other men. Jihad says that he devoured 2,000 books in Guantánamo.

When he recently told the Washington Post that he intended to stage a hunger strike in front of the US Embassy unless his family was allowed to visit him soon, it triggered such an outcry that the Uruguayan foreign minister wanted to speak with him.

Cliff Sloan: The Intermediary

The case has also received a lot of attention in the United States. If Jihad makes good on his threat, closing Guantánamo could become even more complicated than it already is.

When Cliff Sloan, a savvy attorney in his fifties, served as a US envoy in recent years, his goal was to ensure that President Obama would not go down in history as someone who had broken his promises. But Sloan resigned a few days after signing Jihad’s release papers, apparently because things were not progressing as quickly as he would have liked.

Sloan is now sitting at a conference table in the offices of his law firm, not far from the White House. He is wearing a pinstriped suit and round glasses. He chooses his words with care.

“Again and again,” he says, “during my conversations around the world, I kept hearing that the end of Guantánamo would be a great victory in the fight against terrorism.”

There were 166 detainees in Guantánamo when Sloan assumed his position in July 2013. Today, almost two years later, there are still 122. To close Guantánamo, that number would have to be reduced to less than 60, because the annual cost per detainee would then increase to more than $6 million (€5.38 million), making it almost impossible to justify the camp’s existence, both politically and economically.

“It’s difficult,” says Sloan.

In 2009, shortly after assuming office, Obama established a commission to thoroughly investigate the cases of all detainees in Guantánamo at the time. During the course of this investigation, a large majority of the prisoners were “cleared for release.” It was a bureaucratic way of saying that, unfortunately, America had been mistaken. The reason so many detainees are still being held at Guantánamo today is that America doesn’t know what to do with them.

The problem, says Sloan, is that most of the remaining detainees are from countries to which the United States does not deport people. Al-Qaida is gaining influence in Yemen, where the largest number of detainees is from. It’s also impossible to send anyone back to war-torn Syria, partly because US authorities would lose sight of them there.

“The prison itself has now become a security risk,” says Sloan. US officials cannot rule out the possibility that some of the prisoners could seek revenge against America. What are needed now are trustworthy third countries that haven’t already shut their doors on negotiations for taking in former Guantánamo inmates.

“I have rarely met a more impressive man than President Mujica,” says Sloan. In fact, he had selected Mujica. Sloan knew that the Uruguayan president, a member of a guerilla group at the time, had been in prison in the 1970s for his involvement in attacks against the military dictatorship. As president, he enacted an abortion law against resistance from the church and legalized marijuana use. It seemed that Mujica was non-dogmatic and steady enough not to cave in to the first wave of opposition. He was to be the man who would open the door to South America for Guantánamo detainees.

Sloan’s plan seemed to work. In December — shortly after the men had moved into their house in Montevideo — Chile, Brazil and Columbia indicated that they were considering taking in detainees. Uruguay has to work now. Anything that could stir the waters would be unhelpful. For instance, if Jihad truly staged his hunger strike in front of the US Embassy, it could very well close the door to South America again.

Omar: The Silent One

“Jihad doesn’t realize that he is involving us in his campaigns,” says Omar. “People lump us together. They think we’re like him: ungrateful and rebellious. We have already tried to talk to him, but it was no use. I don’t know what Jihad is thinking. Even in Guantánamo, when we walked around the yard, we rarely ever spoke to each other.”

Abd al-Hadi Omar Faraj is a quiet 34-year-old who somehow managed to hold onto his smile. He’s wearing narrow, slightly tinted glasses and a baseball cap over his short hair. Unlike Jihad, Omar doesn’t set any conditions. On the contrary, he is pleased to have the company.

Omar is lying on the bed in a hotel room, which he moved to a few days ago. He says that he couldn’t stand the closeness anymore, the unspoken suffering that has settled over the house on Calle Maldonado. He also wanted his own bathroom. The Metro, a very basic hotel paid for by the union, is only a few blocks from the house on Calle Maldonado. Mohammed also stayed at the hotel when he first arrived in Montevideo, but he couldn’t endure being alone for long. A picture a neighbor’s daughter painted for him is on a table in Omar’s room. Next to it is a Spanish dictionary, which Omar is now consulting more and more often, even if there is still little room in his head for foreign grammar. Omar knows that he needs to learn to be on his own, because the government will stop providing him with his monthly stipend of $600 after two years.

He sits up.

“Do you know if they are looking for people here who know how to slaughter a lamb?” he asks.

In his letter to the Uruguayan people, Omar wrote that he had left school after the sixth grade. In the years before he left Syria, he worked for a butcher, who taught him the halal method of slaughtering a lamb. He had hoped that someone would contact him, but it seems that his skills are not in demand in Uruguay. “Maybe I should learn to drive a car,” he says. “I could become a taxi driver.”

He suggests that we go out for a walk along the ocean, which he says he was able to smell in Guantánamo on some days. There are joggers and cyclists on the waterfront promenade. Couples are sitting on a jetty, holding hands. Sometimes, when Omar spots an attractive woman, he shyly turns around to look at her.

“I don’t understand why they cut off our phone,” he says. “Why don’t they just give us a credit, like 10 hours a month?”

He hasn’t heard from his parents in 51 days, he says. The telephone lines have been destroyed in the city where they live. No one has Skype, and Omar’s only way of communicating with his parents is by calling his father’s mobile phone.

“He didn’t know that I was still alive,” says Omar.

When asked what it was like to hear his father’s voice again after such a long time, Omar stares at the sea and swallows.

“When he called,” says Omar, “he sounded like an old man and a stranger. When I said: Hey, this is your son, he didn’t say anything for a moment. I heard him crying. After a while, he asked me how I was, and I said I was doing well. Luckily he didn’t ask too many questions.” His youngest sister, who wasn’t even in school when Omar was sent to Guantánamo, now has a child of her own.

Omar was 19 in the spring of 2001, when he left the Syrian city of Hama to avoid military service. He also hoped to earn a little money abroad so that he could use it to start a family later on. Omar went to Tehran, where he lived with a butcher, but as a Sunni, he says, he was treated with hostility by the Iranians. He left Iran and went to Kabul, which he describes as his biggest mistake. Omar was stacking orange crates in a grocery store when al-Qaida terrorists crashed two aircraft into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York.

Suddenly the world had changed.

American military aircraft began appearing in the skies above Kabul. Soldiers with the Afghan Northern Alliance entered Kabul, where they hunted down Arabs who, in their minds, could only be in the country for one reason: They must have had something to do with the 9/11 attacks. Within weeks, Kabul had changed into a place where he no longer felt safe, says Omar.

He took a taxi toward Pakistan, not realizing that the Americans were now paying bounties for men like him. He was arrested at the border and, six months later, on June 8, 2002, he was flown to Guantánamo. When he gave the US authorities his account of what had happened, they treated it as a “typical, fabricated al-Qaida plot.” He was now a threat to the security of the United States.

Omar says that he has forgotten how many times he was asked what his connection to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was, how often he prayed and whether the hostel where he was staying in Kabul was a terrorist cell.

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that their stories are similar to a certain extent. Jihad used to be a truck driver before an Afghan businessman convinced him to sell honey in Kabul. Mohammed, born into a large Palestinian family, had joined the Sunni missionary movement Tablighi Jamaat, which had promised him that he could make a living as a teacher in Afghanistan. All of the men had traveled down long and convoluted paths that had placed them in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When Omar is asked when he began to believe that President Mujica was serious about accepting him for asylum, he laughs derisively. “When I stepped off the plane here,” he says. “They had this method in Guantánamo. Sometimes they would show up in our cell with civilian clothing, and they would say to us: ‘You’re going to be released now.’ Then they would take us out to the airfield, but then they just drove us around the island a few times.”

Mujica: The President

Each of the men seems to have a different approach to his newfound freedom. While Jihad’s thoughts usually revolve around the past, Omar tries to imagine a future, and yet he has trouble launching into that future. Perhaps this is why they sometimes feel as if Uruguay were merely another prison, just with better living conditions: a gap in time where the present hardly exists. On the other hand, perhaps it’s still too early to tell.

In February, union representatives took Abdul and Mohammed to a factory outside the city. There were two positions available there, one in the tool store and one in the cafeteria. It was easy work, but the two men turned down the jobs before they had even finished looking around. A few days later, President Mujica drove his Beetle to Calle Maldonado. He came alone, accompanied only by an interpreter. Mujica sat down on the sofa and muttered that he had not come as president but as a father figure and friend, and someone who had also spent time in prison.

Mujica was in prison for almost 15 years, most of them in total isolation. “So I know what I’m talking about,” he said. Then he launched into a lengthy monologue.

He talked about the immigrants who had cultivated the land with their bare hands, ordinary, tenacious people who — like his own father — had taken a long journey to seek their fortunes in a foreign place. He too, Mujica said, had reconnected with his life by working in the fields. It was a dressing-down, and the message was clear: Stop making such a fuss about everything.

A few days later Mujica, speaking on the radio, said that the men from Guantánamo had the delicate hands of middle-class intellectuals.

It is a Saturday morning, and Mujica is sitting on a plastic chair in front of his shed, with the sun shining in his face. He is wearing a dirty tracksuit and drinking a cup of tea. He comes across as a man who would rather listen to the birds than the chatter of guests at a state reception.

After a while, Mujica gets up and walks away without saying a word. He returns a few minutes layer, at the wheel of a tractor, which he drives into the shed, where he disconnects the plow. Then he parks the tractor outside, next to a field. It’s Mujica’s standard performance for journalists who come to see him.

Then he motions for us to follow him.

He walks across a meadow, ducking under clothes lines, before sitting down on a bench in front of his house — the same bench where the former king of Spain recently sat. He had come to see for himself how Mujica lived. He twists his wrinkled face into a toothless smile.

“To be honest,” he says, “I don’t know what the Arabs are complaining about. We pay them $600 a month. One in six Uruguayans lives on the same amount of money, and most of them work.”

Mujica takes off his baseball cap.

“One of the men asked me if I was able to work two months after being released,” he says. “I was ready after two hours.”

Mujica says he understands that he is comparing apples and oranges. Unlike the former Guantánamo detainees, he was able to rely on his language, his wife and his politics at the time. But most of all, he says, he learned in prison that the expectations we have of freedom are exaggerated. All Mujica needed was a piece of land where he could grow vegetables. Even today, when he gets tired of being around other people, he withdraws to the seat of his tractor.

Asked if it was a mistake to bring the Arabs into the country, he responds, “Absolutely not.” After all, he adds, “there was no evidence against them. They were the hostages of a regime, just as we once were. When I met Obama a year ago, I had the sense that his intention to close Guantánamo is honest.”

The Americans first approached him in an official capacity in January 2014, when he received a call from Vice President Joe Biden. Soon afterwards, he received a visit from Cliff Sloan, who told him that Washington’s condition was that the detainees could not leave their new home for two years. Mujica says he rejected the Americans’ demands. Instead, he negotiated with Washington and extracted the promise that the United States would open its market to Uruguayan citrus fruit. He also wanted the approval of Cuban President Raul Castro, an old companion from his guerilla days.

Ten days after Mujica had greeted the Arabs at the airport, the frosty relationship between Washington and Havana began to thaw. Cuba released an American and Obama released three Cuban agents who had been imprisoned in the United States for years. Mujica says that this was one of his conditions when he was in Washington in May 2014.

But then the detainee release was delayed by another seven months while the US Congress debated whether to approve the extradition. Then the election campaign over Mujica’s successor began in Uruguay. Tabaré Vázquez, the candidate representing Mujica’s party, asked Mujica not to burden his campaign with the issue of the Arabs from Guantánamo.

They were left with less than a month to prepare for the detainees’ arrival, says union official Gambera. It was typical of Mujica, he adds, because Mujica is someone who prefers to think in broad terms instead of concerning himself with details such as psychologists and interpreters.

In April 2015, President Vázquez announced that he intended to request financial assistance from Obama. In Chile, there was now talk that Uruguay no longer had any interest in accepting released detainees. Cliff Sloan’s plan was threatening to unravel. Perhaps it was naïve to believe that people like Omar or Jihad could be quietly disposed of in a country like Uruguay.

Mohammed: The Disappointed One

On one of these evenings, Jihad is sitting, ghostlike, in front of the computer in the foyer, looking at photos from a Syrian prison. They depict bodies covered in blood and guards smiling for the camera. The images are reminiscent of another symbol. “It’s like Abu Ghraib,” says Jihad, who believes that one of the torture victims is his daughter’s husband.

He seems absent. He hasn’t taken any sleeping pills for days. He is now refusing to be seen by doctors, and Jihad has also withdrawn his application to be reunited with his family. He is refusing, once again, just as he did in Guantánamo, where refusing to eat was the only way to protest against the conditions there. It seems as if he were unwilling to confront reality.

On this day, Ali is wearing a thick bandage over his right eye, where a Cuban doctor performed an operation.

Omar, who moved back into the house a few days ago because the union had stopped paying for the hotel, says that he has never kissed a woman, and that the yearning to do so eats away at him. He believes that a woman would help him to forget what happened to him. “But where should I look?” he asks. “Who needs a man like me?”

Mohammed is in his room, where he spends most of his time in bed with his laptop. He isn’t keen on meeting with visitors from Germany.

In 2010, when Germany was negotiating the acceptance of three detainees with the United States, Mohammed was one of the candidates. The German government representatives met with him so many times that Mohammed believed they were serious. He even practiced his German with a dictionary his attorney had given him. He says a few German words — “Tisch” (table) and “Stuhl” (chair). “I still haven’t forgotten them,” he adds.

At some point during those weeks in which Mohammed was waiting to finally be released, the communication with Germany was discontinued. It was only later that he learned that then Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière had decided to reduce the number of detainees from three to two, so that it wouldn’t seem as if the Americans were taking advantage of him. “That disappointment was worse than anything else,” says Mohammed.

Now he is sitting in a far corner of the world, occasionally chatting with a former cellmate who now lives in Germany, in a town on the Rhine River. “He’s doing well,” says Mohammed. “He has a good income and his family lives with him in his house.” He sometimes wonders what his life would be like if he had been the one to move into that house on the Rhine.

Freedom is not a value in itself, not after those 12 years, and not just for Mohammed. Half a year after the six men arrived in their new home, the euphoria has faded away. Too many expectations have been destroyed by reality. Disappointment has turned into rage.

The one thing America had feared happens on the evening of April 24. Jihad makes good on his threat. Together with the other former detainees, he walks from the house on Calle Maldonado to the fortress-like American Embassy. They unfurl their prayer rugs in front of the high wall surrounding the building. Jihad tells the assembled journalists that good intentions are not enough for them. They have rights, he says, and they want to meet with the ambassador. They are told to submit their request through official channels.

Since then, they have been camped out in front of the embassy and have been negotiating, not with the Americans but with the new Uruguayan government and the United Nations refugee agency. They want more money and assistance for their families. To them, their demands represent the price of 12 lost years.

*****

The hunger strike outside the US Embassy, mentioned at the end of Der Spiegel‘s article, lasted nearly four weeks. As the Associated Press reported on May 19, the four men who had taken part in it and who were demanding compensation from the US — led by Abu Wa’el Dhiab — ended it “after reaching a deal with Uruguayan officials.”

As the AP described it, the Tunisian, Adel bin Muhammad El Ouerghi, said that Uruguay’s government “agreed to guarantee each man private housing for two years with the possibility to renew.” He also said that the men “would continue to receive their monthly stipend of 15,000 pesos ($566) plus health insurance and Spanish classes.”

In a phone call, El Ouerghi said, “I’m very happy. We were in a bad situation and now it will be better.”

Christian Mirza, an Egyptian-born Uruguayan who had been appointed to mediate in the protest, said the monthly stipend “would be adjusted for inflation and take into account any family members who come.”

Mauricio Pigola, a lawyer who represents the men in Montevideo, said that five of the six men had signed the agreement. The exception, unsurprisingly, was Abu Wa’el Dhiab.

The AP also explained that, during their protest outside the US Embassy, the men had “argued that America should compensate them because they were never convicted of a crime.” In response, US officials “repeatedly said the country had no obligation to help them because they were legally detained during war,” overlooking the fact that, unlike in previous wars, the Bush administration made no effort to screen these captured to ascertain if they were combatants or civilians.

The AP also noted that, although the protest “helped the men get more guarantees” from the Uruguayan government, many Uruguayans were not impressed. Many people, as the AP put it, “expressed frustration that the men wanted more government help than many locals in this poor South American nation receive and yet were not willing to work.”

In February, as noted previously, the men were offered work, but turned down the opportunities. As the AP explained, they “have said they do want to work, but first must learn Spanish and deal with health issues related to their confinement, from anxiety to digestive problems.”

Responding to suggestions that the protest “could make it harder to resettle other Guantánamo detainees, according to legal observers, El Ouerghi said, “We were a special case that wasn’t connected to others.” He added, “Doing this protest was a good decision.”

In the latest news, it has been announced that two of the men — Adel bin Muhammad El Ouerghi and Omar Abdelhadi Faraj — will be marrying Uruguayan women who have converted to Islam, who they met at the Egyptian Islamic Center in Montevideo.

Imam Samir Selim told the Associated Press that he would officiate at the ceremony, taking place this Saturday, June 6. “This is great. It’s beautiful,” Imam Selim said in an interview by phone. He added, “These men want to make their lives here in Uruguay. They want to work and live like other men, and that means getting married.”

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.

Appeals Court Refuses to Allow Government to Block Release of Guantánamo Force-Feeding Tapes

Last Friday, the appeals court in Washington, D.C. — the D.C. Circuit Court — kept alive hopes that the US government will be forced to release footage of a hunger striking Guantánamo prisoner being violently removed from his cell and force-fed, when a three-judge panel — consisting of Chief Judge Merrick Garland, Judge Patricia Millett and Judge Robert Wilkins — refused to accept an appeal by the government arguing against the release of the videotapes.

When the court heard the case last month, Justice Department attorneys “argued that the courts cannot order evidence used in trial to be unsealed if it has been classified by the government,” as The Intercept described it. Justice Department lawyer Catherine Dorsey told the judges, “We don’t think there is a First Amendment right to classified documents.” The Intercept added that the judges “appeared skeptical. Chief Judge Merrick Garland characterized the government’s position as tantamount to claiming the court ‘has absolutely no authority’ to unseal evidence even if it’s clear the government’s bid to keep it secret is based on ‘irrationality’ or that it’s ‘hiding something.'”

The tapes are of Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian prisoner who spent last year challenging the government’s force-feeding program in the courts. Dhiab was freed in Uruguay in December, but his case continues. In June, Cori Crider, one of Dhiab’s lawyers at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, said after viewing the videos, which have only to date been seen by the lawyers, “While I’m not allowed to discuss the contents of these videos, I can say that I had trouble sleeping after viewing them.”

Writing of the ruling, Reprieve noted that the court “ordered the Obama Administration to redact 12 hours of secret Guantánamo force-feeding footage in preparation for its public release, rejecting the Administration’s argument that not one single frame should be seen by the public.”

The release of the videotapes was ordered last October by District Judge Gladys Kessler, “following a First Amendment intervention from 16 US press organizations in the abuse case Dhiab v Obama,” as Reprieve described it. I wrote about Judge Kessler’s ruling at the time, in an article entitled, “In Ground-Breaking Ruling, US Judge Gladys Kessler Orders Guantánamo Force-Feeding Videos to be Made Public.”

Reprieve also noted, “The Obama Administration defied Judge Kessler’s order to prepare the videos for release, complaining that the process was too much work and insisting that revealing even one frame from the videos posed a national security risk.”

With no attempt made to deal with the redactions that Judge Kessler accepted as necessary — to protect the identity of military personnel, for example — the administration, as Reprieve described it, “took the case straight to D.C.’s federal Court of Appeals in an attempt to get the order overturned.”

However, as Reprieve described it, the appeals court “ruled that the Administration’s refusal to comply with the lower court’s order was wrong, and rejected its attempt to use the ‘burdensome’ task of redacting videos as a reason to circumvent the First Amendment.”

Reprieve added, “The Obama Administration must now comply with Judge Kessler’s original order to redact the videotapes to address national security concerns, and submit the redacted tapes to her court for reconsideration ahead of their release.”

Responding to the ruling, Alka Pradhan of Reprieve, who is one Abu Wa’el Dhiab’s attorneys in the US, said, “The Obama Administration’s defiance of Judge Kessler’s order suggests a basic contempt for both the court’s authority and our First Amendment rights, which the Circuit judges recognised.”

She added, “The Administration is fighting hard because once those videotapes are redacted, they are one step closer to public release — and the government is one step closer to being held accountable for their treatment of Guantánamo detainees. Yet the harder the Administration resists, the more they confirm that they have much wrongdoing to hide. It is time to stop running absurd arguments, and simply to do the right thing: expose and end the ongoing abuse of hunger-strikers at Guantánamo Bay.”

Providing further details, The Intercept — one of the 16 media organizations calling for the release of the footage, via its parent company First Look Media — noted that, unfortunately, “it’s still not clear when the public might actually see the videos.”

The Intercept noted that the appeals court “called the government’s appeal ‘premature,’ and declined to weigh in on the merits of releasing the videos.”

Because Judge Kessler’s order allowed for further negotiations over redactions, the judges wrote, “it is possible that appropriate redactions will limit the scope of, or perhaps eliminate altogether, the government’s concerns over release of the videotapes.”

The Intercept also noted that, “while that may seem like a setback for the Obama administration, the appeals court’s decision also noted that sending the case back to the district court would give that court a chance to consider more detailed government declarations about ‘the harm associated with the release of the videotapes.'”

In the meantime, the judges confirmed that the footage will stay sealed.

I hope the government now stops dragging its heels and gets to work on making the necessary redactions so the footage can be released. However, it is clear, from its delaying tactics, including this pointless appeal, that officials know how disturbing the videos are — and are trying whatever they can to worm their way out of their responsibility to show the world the reality of how the administration deals with hunger strikers.

To make matters worse, in many cases, as with Abu Wa’el Dhiab, those on a hunger strike were only refusing food — and were then being force-fed — because they had been cleared for release many years ago (mostly in 2009 by President Obama’s high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force), but were in despair about ever being released, and had decided that the only way their plight might get noticed was if they became hunger strikers.

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.

Shaker Aamer’s Latest Words from Guantánamo; Thanks Roger Waters, Says, “I Am An Innocent Man and a Good Person”

In the latest news about Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who has long been cleared for release, and who wants only to return to his family in London, his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of the legal action charity Reprieve, released sections from a number of Shaker’s recent letters from the prison. Clive made Shaker’s words available to We Stand With Shaker, the campaign group I established with Joanne MacInnes last November.

The quotes were subsequently made available to the media and were read out in Parliament yesterday by Jeremy Corbyn MP (Labour, Islington North), a member of the cross-party Shaker Aamer Parliamentary Group, and one of four MPs — along with the Conservatives David Davis and Andrew Mitchell, and his Labour colleague Andy Slaughter — who visited Washington D.C. two weeks ago to discuss Shaker’s case with senior officials.

In a foreign affairs debate in the House of Commons yesterday, Jeremy Corbyn urged ministers to “step up the fight to free Mr. Aamer,” as the Daily Mail described it. “He has never been charged, never been prosecuted, never been through any legal process whatsoever,” Mr. Corbyn said, adding, “Can we have an undertaking from the Foreign Office to follow this up with real vigour to push the Obama administration to name the date by which Shaker Aamer will be released and returned to his family?”

Below are Shaker Aamer’s words, from his latest letters, in which he thanks those MPs who took part in the Parliamentary debate on his case on March 17, which led to the government backing the motion calling for his release from Guantánamo and his return to his family in London. Shaker also thanked two particular supporters — Dr. David Nicholl, the neurologist and human rights campaigner from Birmingham, who recent ran around the White House and ran the London Marathon to highlight Shaker’s plight, and music legend Roger Waters, formerly the chief songwriter of Pink Floyd, who is a high-profile supporter of Shaker’s release.

Roger is a great supporter of my work, and he attended the launch of We Stand With Shaker in November and the Valentine’s Day protest outside the US Embassy in February, where he recorded an interview with Sky News. Last summer he also made a powerful video, in which he explained his support for Shaker after being sent Shaker’s words by Clive, which I’m delighted to post below, followed by Shaker’s latest message from Guantánamo:

Shaker Aamer from Roger Waters on Vimeo.

Shaker Aamer’s latest words from Guantánamo

I was reading the Parliamentary debate on my case [see here and here]. I was shocked to see how much these MP’s really care, not only care but really engage and ask the smart questions. I love these good people, not only for asking to release me, but for their effort to close Guantánamo, and how much they are against it. There is not enough gratitude and thanks, I can’t cover my debt to these people in Parliament and outside, including all the people who gave the effort and the time to sign the petition.

I want to thank in particular the four MPs who went all the way to Washington to raise my case. And Dr. David Nicholl from Birmingham, who is running a marathon for me — I hope you win your marathon, David, just as I hope I win mine [here in Guantánamo].

And my special thanks and gratitude goes to the legend Roger Waters. I saw you on RT, speaking good about me and asking for my freedom, next to “Shaker the balloon” [the inflatable figure of Shaker that is at the heart of the We Stand With Shaker campaign]. Please, Roger, don’t ask for justice — demand it. Be sure, Roger, you and everyone else, that I am an innocent man and a good person who never participated in any animal harm let alone human being. We are in Gitmo as the black sheep of US government.

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.

It’s 30 Years Since Margaret Thatcher Trashed the Travellers’ Movement at the Battle of the Beanfield

[image error] Buy my book, The Battle of the Beanfield, here.

Exactly 30 years ago, on June 1, 1985, a convoy of vehicles trying to get to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual free festival in the fields opposite Britain’s most famous ancient monument, was set upon with violence on a scale that has not otherwise been witnessed in peacetime in modern times in the UK.

Around 1,400 police from six counties and the Ministry of Defence were in Wiltshire to “decommission” the convoy, which consisted of around 500 new age travellers, free festival goers and environmental activists. The police were thwarted in their efforts to arrest the majority of the convoy via a roadblock, and the travellers then occupied a pasture field and an adjacent bean field, establishing a stand-off that was only broken late in the afternoon, when, under instructions from on high, the police invaded the fields en masse, and violently assaulted and arrested the travellers — men, women and children — smashing up their vehicles to try and make sure this new nomadic movement would never be able to function again.

Successive waves of legislation — the Public Order Act of 1986 and the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 — largely destroyed Britain’s traveller community, although there were fascinating eruptions of dissent along the way — in particular via the rave scene of the late 80s and early 90s, and the road protest movement that was a direct descendant of the free festival movement. Unable to travel freely, protestors rooted themselves to a fixed spot, occupying land regarded as sacred and, in many noteworthy cases, living in trees in an effort to prevent road-building projects from taking place.

At Stonehenge, after the Battle of the Beanfield, an exclusion zone was declared every June, to prevent the festival from ever taking place again, but eventually, in a memorable ruling in 1999, this was ruled illegal by the Law Lords, and since then what remains of Britain’s counter-cultural tribes — largely supplemented with the hedonistic youth of Wiltshire and the surrounding counties — have been free to celebrate summer solstice in the stones for a 12-hour period overnight, a bizarre and ironic recreation of the festival, which, for the most part, cheerfully occupied the land across the road from the stone circle with only a few thousand festival-goers deigning to make the journey to the stones for spiritual reasons.

The festival, from small beginnings, had become gigantic by 1984, a town that occupied the fields opposite Stonehenge for the whole of June. That last year was dark, as was so much in Thatcher’s Britain at the time, as she was also engaged in violently “decommissioning” her other, bigger “enemy within”, the miners. This was a key part of her malignant mission to destroy Britain’s manufacturing base, through a deeply-engrained hatred of unions and working people, and, through dangerously irresponsible deregulation, making bankers the drivers of the economy instead — with all the divisiveness, misery and almost unbelievable greed and impunity that sector of society has demonstrated ever since, leading to the global crash of 2008 and the subsequent — and largely unremarked — public bailout of the greatest criminals of our lifetimes, none of whom have been jailed for their actions.

Back in 1985, the authorities demonised the festival, using it as an excuse to justify their appalling treatment of the men, women and children of the convoy at the Battle of the Beanfield, but, in large part, what they wanted to destroy was: 1) an ever-growing movement of people taking to the road in response to the tsunami of unemployment in Thatcher’s Britain; 2) a free festival movement that ran from May to September and that functioned as an alternative economy; and 3) perhaps, most crucially, the environmental protestors who, along with the women of Greenham Common, were engaged in frontline direct action that was both environmental and anti-military. The Greenham women’s permanent peace camp, in Berkshire, was opposed to US cruise missiles being based on British soil, and travellers also set up a second camp at Molesworth, in Cambridgeshire, which was earmarked as the second cruise missile base.

Most people don’t know, or don’t remember, but that camp was violently broken up by the largest peacetime mobilisation of troops in modern British history, on February 6, 1985. Symbolically led by Michael Heseltine, 1,500 Royal engineers, 1,000 police and 600 MoD police evicted the 150 members of the “Rainbow Village,” and spent the next four months hounding them as they took to the road, culminating, on June 1, with the assault that came to be known as the Battle of the Beanfield.

It doesn’t take too much thought to realise that, although the authorities couldn’t be seen to truncheon, en masse, the women of Greenham Common, they could violently assault the environmental campaigners of the convoy, and get away with it, by portraying them as dangerous, dirty anarchists threatening Britain’s heritage at Stonehenge with their festival.

That was indeed what happened, even though myself and the majority of the tens of thousands of people who visited — or were part of — the Stonehenge Free Festival in the late 70s and early 80s were only dangerous because we were exploring different ways of living than what was being dictated to us by an intolerant, authoritarian state that, it transpires with hindsight, wanted us to be nothing more than obedient corporate slaves.

It’s exactly ten years since my book The Battle of the Beanfield was published, which features interviews with a variety of people involved in the events of June 1, 1985 (police and observers, as well as travellers), as well as the police log and essays putting the events of June 1, 1985 in a wider context.

The Battle of the Beanfield is still available to buy, as is my previous book Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, a social history of Stonehenge that also functions as an account of British counter-cultural history.

The Battle of the Beanfield features transcripts of some of the interviews conducted for the 1991 documentary ‘Operation Solstice’, made while a number of those assaulted on June 1, 1985 were suing the police. To mark the anniversary, I’m posting ‘Operation Solstice’ below, via YouTube. The documentary, directed by Gareth Morris and Neil Goodwin, was screened by Channel 4 back in 1991, and I wholeheartedly recommend it:

I’d also like to mention another event taking place this year to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield.

‘The Beanfield’ is “a multimedia show about national heritage, state violence and civic freedom,” by performance makers Breach and Guardian award-winning filmmaker Dorothy Allen-Pickard. Mixing Dorothy’s films with live direction by Billy Barrett, winner of the Sunday Times Harold Hobson Drama Critic Award 2014, it is being performed on the following dates:

– Warwick Arts Centre Studio, University of Warwick, CV4 7AL, Tuesday June 23, 1.45pm (contact the venue here)

– Theatre503, The Latchmere, 503 Battersea Park Road, London SW11 3BW, Saturday July 25, 9pm and Sunday July 26, 7pm (contact the venue here)

– Edinburgh Fringe: theSpace on the Mile (Venue 39), The Radisson, 80 High Street, EH1 1TH, August 7-8, 10-15, 17-22, 10 am (book tickets here)

I hope, if the Beanfield interests you, that you can make it to one of these shows. Dorothy and Billy invited me to Wiltshire on a memorable day back in March, to be a consultant as they filmed recreations of the events of June 1, 1985 for the show. The political engagement of everyone involved — mostly students at Warwick University — was refreshing, and it was great to discover that they had all been studying my book in preparation for the filming, which took place at the Beanfield itself.

It was my first visit to this iconic site, although I had passed it many times on the A303, and as we arrived at what we knew to be the approximate location, it became apparent that the change in the road layout since 1985 — with the replacement of a section of the A303 with a dual carriageway — made it difficult to work out exactly where the Beanfield — and the pasture field — were. After driving into the car park of the hotel by the Parkhouse roundabout, we were accosted by an angry local who wanted us to know that, although 30 years had passed, people were still very sensitive about the events of the day.

However, after he was talked down, he pointed us in the right direction, and, while police sirens passed us by, we spent a few hours filming, and reflecting on the events of the day, with — ironically, given the convoy’s environmental leanings — a small solar farm in the background, where, 30 years ago, there would only have been broken and burning vehicles, and bleeding travellers.

See below for the trailer for ‘The Beanfield’, via Vimeo, prepared for its first performances in Warwick last month:

THE BEANFIELD // Trailer from Dorothy Allen-Pickard on Vimeo.

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.

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?

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.

“Petty and Nasty”: Guantánamo Commander Bans Lawyers From Bringing Food to Share with Prisoners

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.

In the latest news from Guantánamo, the prison’s military commander, Rear Adm. Kyle Cozad, has issued a memorandum banning lawyers for the prisoners from bringing food to meetings with their clients. The memorandum, entitled, “Modification to Rules Regarding Detainee Legal and Periodic Review Board Meetings,” states, “Food of any kind, other than that provided by guard force personnel for Detainee consumption, is prohibited within meeting spaces.”

That innocuous sounding ban is, nevertheless, a huge blow to many lawyers and prisoners. Since lawyers were first allowed to visit prisoners ten years ago, and to represent them, after the Supreme Court granted them habeas corpus rights in Rasul v. Bush in June 2004, it has been an opportunity for bonding between lawyers and prisoners, and an opportunity for the prisoners to receive something from the outside world, in a place where, initially, they were completely cut off from the outside world, and where, even now, over six years after Barack Obama became president, they are still more isolated than any other prisoners held by the US — unable, for example, to meet with any family members, even if their relatives could afford to fly there, and, in almost all cases, held without charge or trial in defiance of international norms.

As veteran Guantánamo reporter Carol Rosenberg explained in an article for the Miami Herald, “the custom of eating with a captive across a meeting table at Camp Echo — with the prisoner shackled by an ankle to the floor — took on cultural and symbolic significance almost from the start when lawyers brought burgers and breakfast sandwiches from the base McDonald’s to prison meetings in 2005.”

Writing of those first meetings, Rosenberg noted that the two sides “were strangers.” She added, “Meetings required an act of faith on both sides.” When the two sides became acquainted, some attorneys “moved on to traditional Middle East or Afghan food — falafel, hummus, baklava, kebabs — brought from restaurants in the Washington, D.C., region, or prepared in guest quarters before meetings. The two sides met across a taste of home, or something new, with the captive playing host, sharing the food if he chose.”

According to the commander’s memorandum, the ban on food at meetings addresses “health, safety and security concerns applicable to all Detainee meetings conducted in designated Camp Echo and Echo ll meeting huts or Camp Delta Gold and Silver buildings, regardless of the purpose of the meeting.”

Carol Rosenberg noted that Navy Capt. Tom Gresback, a spokesman for Guantánamo, called the new rule a “procedural modification,” that was “in the best interest of health, sanitation, safety and force protection.”

He said that there was “no specific episode that ended the policy,” beyond “ongoing patterns of possible improper sanitation and health practices,” and what Rosenberg called “a desire to imitate procedures at federal prisons and the military’s disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.”

“A legal room is not designed to be a dining facility,” Gresback added.

Responding, Shane Kadidal, a senior managing attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, said, “It’s true that normal prisons don’t let lawyers bring in food,” but, he added, Guantánamo is “the exact opposite of a normal prison.”

Kadidal also said that eating during meetings had “just become an accepted part of the routine” at Guantánamo, where, in contrast to “normal” prisons, “US troops comb through the defense lawyers’ legal documents.”

He described the tradition of lawyers bringing food to the prisoners as “[a] bit of compensation for the hassles of being shackled and stuffed into a van to meet with your lawyers in a tin shed in Camp Echo when the litigation isn’t really going anywhere.”

Alka Pradhan, of the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, called the new rule “petty and nasty.”

“It’s actually quite tragic for the clients,” she said, adding, “Sometimes the food we bring is the only thing from the outside world they’ve seen in months, and they really look forward to it.” Carol Rosenberg explained that, after military inspection, she had brought “everything from Egg McMuffins and traditional Middle East sweets to fresh fruit and granola bars.”

Pradhan also said that the ban deprives prisoners of “a little slice of the outside world for a couple of hours” without, as Carol Rosenberg put it, “wondering whether a guard had spit or mixed pork into the food as they shared a meal with a lawyer” — “someone who’s not needlessly hostile to them.” in Pradhan’s words.

Other types of food brought by lawyers include “black seed, a home remedy for digestive issues” which Reprieve’s lawyers have taken to meetings with Younis Chekkouri (aka Younus Chekhouri), a Moroccan who has been approved for release since 2009, and whose case we have written about before.

Another Reprieve client, Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who was resettled in Uruguay in December, after spending the year challenging the government’s force-feeding protocols for hunger strikers, said, as the Miami Herald put it, that his lawyers “brought fruit juice to meetings that he would sometimes sip for strength at the height of his hunger strike.”

The Miami Herald also reported that, several years ago, a lawyer and translator for made traditional Uighur noodles at the prison’s guest quarters for Ahmad Tourson, one of Guantánamo’s 22 Uighur prisoners (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang Province, seized by mistake), who, in October 2009, was resettled on the Pacific island of Palau. Shane Kadidal remembered that the three used Bic pens as chopsticks.

Another lawyer, a former military lawyer, estimated that he had spent $5,000 of his own money bringing meals from food outlets on the naval base — including McDonald’s and Pizza Hut — to meetings with Omar Khadr, the child prisoner who was returned to Canada in 2012 and freed from a Canadian prison on bail just three weeks ago.

The lawyer, who has defended several Guantánamo prisoners — and US soldiers accused of crimes in Germany — but who did not want to be identified, said he brought meals to his clients at meetings in both places, while in uniform.

Another former military lawyer at Guantánamo, Navy Reserve Commander Suzanne Lachelier, explained how she “would ferry Lebanese and Afghan food from Washington,” adding “fresh baked chocolate chip cookies from a base cafeteria,” while working with Ibrahim al-Qosi, a Sudanese cook charged in the military commissions, who was freed in 2012.

“The main point was to allow the ‘sharing of bread,’ whatever that bread was,” Lachelier said. recalling that “bringing him food permitted him to play host, if briefly, by offering his lawyer a cookie, a small reprieve from an otherwise powerless state of indefinite detention without charge.”

The new rule is just the latest change in a series of changes made by Rear Adm. Cozad, whose one-year tour of duty ends in July. As Carol Rosenberg noted, he earlier “recommended that a Navy nurse face trial for refusing to force-feed detainees, something medical professionals said was a reversal of a promise to not punish military healthcare providers for raising ethical objections.”

He also “implemented a policy of using female guards as escorts” at Camp 7, where the so-called “high-value detainees” are held, which some of the more devout prisoners complained about, for breaking “a long-running practice of having male soldiers handle prisoners who raised religious objections to being touched by women.”

Rosenberg also explained that lawyers for the “high-value detainees” were disappointed but not surprised. They said that a stove and a microwave, used by guards and defense lawyers, “recently vanished from the compound where former CIA captives meet with their lawyers.”

I hope this ban doesn’t stand, as, for the nine years I have been writing about Guantánamo and the men held there, I have been aware of how significant the “sharing of bread” at the prison has been. And shutting it down now, for spurious “operational reasons,” cannot be perceived as anything other than a cruel and unnecessary punishment for men who have already endured 13 years of unjustifiable isolation.

What you can do now

To call for the ban to be dropped, please call US Southern Command on 305-437-1213 and ask for Rear Adm. Cozad to continue to allow prisoners — “detainees,” as the authorities describe them — to have food brought to them by their attorneys.

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.