Please Read “Teaching Trump About Gitmo,” An Op-ed in the New York Daily News by Close Guantánamo Co-Founders Tom Wilner and Andy Worthington

[image error] Please support my work! I’m currently in the US to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 15th anniversary of its opening, and trying to raise $1000 (£800) to support my visit.

 

I’m delighted to report that yesterday, while I was crossing the Atlantic by plane and was offline, the New York Daily News published “Teaching Trump About Gitmo,” an op-ed that I wrote with my friend and colleague Tom Wilner, the US attorney with whom I co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign exactly five years ago.

The op-ed was a response to the president elect’s recent — and disgraceful — tweet, in which he stated, “There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.”

In the hope of educating Mr. Trump, Tom and I pointed out that, of the 55 men still held, 19 have been approved for release by two inter-agency review processes — 2009’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, and the current Periodic Review Boards — which are “made up of our nation’s top security, defense and justice officials,” and just ten are facing — or have faced — trials, leaving 26 others whose cases should continue to be reviewed by the Periodic Review Boards, as it seems certain that some of them will also end up being approved for release, like 38 of the 64 men originally whose cases have been reviewed by the PRBs in the last three years.

What Mr. Trump needs to remember is that, when the 2009 task force reviewed the cases of these 38 men in 2009, they were found to be either “too dangerous to release,” or were recommended for prosecution, decisions that, with hindsight, can only be regarded as deriving from a position of extreme and, it must be said, unwarranted caution.

As Donald Trump’s troubling presidency nears, it is important for those opposed to the continued existence of Guantánamo to bear in mind that (1) holding firm on the need to release prisoners already approved for release, and (2) maintaining the Periodic Review Boards that were established as a result of presidential order by President Obama in March 2011 are not negotiable and are the key issues on which to immediately put pressure on him — whilst, of course, also reminding him of (3) the undying need to close the prison for good, (4) not to send anyone new there, (5) not to send US citizens there for military trials, and (6) not to reintroduce torture — all policies he embraced on the campaign trail.

In our op-ed, Tom and I also reminded Donald Trump of the failure of Guantánamo’s military commission trial system, which “is broken and has delayed justice rather than delivering it,” and also pointed out the unacceptable economic costs of keeping Guantánamo open. As we explained, “If President Obama leaves about 40 prisoners in Trump’s hands, we will be spending more than $11 million per prisoner each year to continue incarcerating them at Guantanamo. By contrast, the average cost of keeping a prisoner locked up on the U.S. mainland is less than $32,000 per year … There is simply no business or security justification for paying that difference.”

I hope you have time to read the op-ed, and will share it if you find it useful.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), 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.