Read My Latest Article for Al-Jazeera About the Problems with Guantánamo’s New Review Boards

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Read My Latest Article for Al-Jazeera About the Problems with Guantánamo’s New Review Boards

Dear friends and supporters,

I do hope you have time to read my latest article for Al-Jazeera, “Guantánamo’s secretive review boards,” and to share it if you find it worthwhile. It was posted yesterday, and I’m glad to note that it has been in the top ten most viewed articles.

It deals with the Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo, established to review the cases of the majority of the prisoners who have not been cleared for release. Of the 162 men still held, 82 were cleared for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office, while the other 80 were either recommended for ongoing detention without charge or trial, or for prosecution.

In March 2011, President Obama issued an executive order authorizing the ongoing detention without charge or trial of 48 men based on the task force’s recommendations, on the unacceptable basis that they were too dangerous to release but that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial — which meant, of course, that what purported to be evidence was no such thing, and consisted largely of dubious statements by the prisoners, produced in circumstances that were not conducive to truth-telling.

The president only sweetened his outrageous decision to issue an executive order authorizing indefinite detention by promising that these men would receive periodic reviews, to establish whether they should continue to be held. Shamefully, however, the review boards were not established until this summer (over three years later), and the first hearing only took place two weeks ago, of a Yemeni named Mahmud al-Mujahid (aka Mahmoud al-Mujahid), who, like many of the remaining prisoners, has spent over a third of his life at Guantánamo. 33 years old, he was first seized crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, when he was just 21. Ludicrously, the notion that he was in Afghanistan to support the Taliban — as many of the prisoners were, if they were not charity workers, missionaries or refugees –was replaced, in Guantánamo, with an absurd claim that he had been a bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, a claim made in a number of deeply unreliable statements by his fellow prisoners.

The review boards have barely been touched upon in the mainstream media, with the exception of the indefatigable Carol Rosenberg in the Miami Herald, and I hope you have the opportunity to read my article, as it contains new information about them, which, unfortunately, does not augur well for those still held — primarily, that the review process for the 46 survivors of the president’s executive order (after two died), plus 25 others who had been slated for prosecution until the military commission trial system began unravelling, is moving so slowly that it will take many years for all the men’s cases to be reviewed, even if — as is not yet clear — there is a willingness on the part of the authorities to critically examine whether the men do actually constitute any kind of threat.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — 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).