Archive for March, 2010

On Friday, there was another successful screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the new documentary film, co-directed by Polly Nash and myself, which was chosen as the closing film in Oxford Brookes University’s 8th Human Rights Film Festival (also see here). The screening was part of an ongoing UK tour of the film, in which former prisoner Omar Deghayes and myself (who are both in the film) are attending post-screening Q&A sessions, in venues from Canterbury to Aberdeen — sometimes (as on Friday) with Polly Nash, and sometimes with other guests as well.

Over a hundred people crammed into the Music Room of Headington Hill Hall (a splendid 19th century mansion, which was once the home of Robert Maxwell) for the screening on Friday evening, and in a Q&A session following the film — after Polly and I had guided Omar Deghayes, travelling by car, to the correct location by mobile phone — we fielded a range of perceptive questions and comments from the audience.

This allowed me to encourage audience members to take action for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo (whose story is featured in the film), by sending a letter to foreign secretary David Miliband that is reproduced here (so you can cut and paste your own copy), and encouraging others to do so. You can also email David Miliband and send a letter to Prime Minster Gordon Brown via Amnesty International’s campaign page here.

I also discussed the latest revelations of British complicity in torture, in the cases of Binyam Mohamed (also featured in the film) and Shaker Aamer, and Omar, as always, provided some fresh insights into life in Guantánamo, where he was held for over five years, and the role of the British intelligence services in his interrogations in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Guantánamo. The Q&A session was filmed by BrookesTV, and will be available on the website soon.

Polly and I had decided to make a day of it in Oxford, arriving at 3 pm on a warm, sunny afternoon, and wandering down to Art Jericho (on King Street in Jericho) for “Homeland,” an exhibition of photographs by my old friend Adrian Arbib. The centerpiece of the exhibition, which runs until March 13, is a collection of Adrian’s powerful and poignant photos of the Solsbury Hill road protest in 1994.

As the publicity states, this constitutes “a unique record of an important moment in British political history when a political movement changed government transport policy,” but there are also many other protest photos from the last 15 years, including GM crop protests, Jeremy Clarkson being pied, and a series of photos from the occupation of the Castle Mill Boatyard, a little-reported story of British Waterways’ greed and stupidity, which led to the closure of the Castle Mill Boatyard in Jericho in 2005, and its subsequent occupation by canal boat residents and other members of the local community, while British Waterways tried to press ahead with a cynical property development, which ultimately failed.

I first met Adrian in 2003, when I was looking for photos for my book Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, a history of the British counter-culture which included a section on the road protest movement of the 1990s. Adrian kindly allowed me to reproduce a number of his photos in my book, and I’m delighted to report that he has now produced a book of his Solsbury Hill protest photos, Solsbury Hill: Chronicle of a Road Protest, which is discussed in more detail in a separate article.

After the exhibition, Polly and I wandered through central Oxford, visiting New College, where I studied more years ago than I care to remember, and stopping for coffee at another old haunt, the Queen’s Lane Coffee House (which claims to be the oldest in Europe), before catching a bus up the hill to Headington and the screening. As with all the screenings since the launch of the film in October, the attendance demonstrated, yet again, that there is a real appetite for information about Guantánamo and the crimes and failures of the “War on Terror” that is not being adequately met by the mainstream media.

My thanks to the postgraduate students on Oxford Brookes University’s MA course in Development and Emergency Practice, who organize the festival each year, and who did such a great job of welcoming us, and attracting such a great crowd.

About the film

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” tells the story of Guantánamo (and includes sections on extraordinary rendition and secret prisons) with a particular focus on how the Bush administration turned its back on domestic and international laws, how prisoners were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan without adequate screening (and often for bounty payments), and why some of these men may have been in Afghanistan or Pakistan for reasons unconnected with militancy or terrorism (as missionaries or humanitarian aid workers, for example).

The film is based around interviews with former prisoners (Moazzam Begg and, in his first major interview, Omar Deghayes, who was released in December 2007), lawyers for the prisoners (Clive Stafford Smith in the UK and Tom Wilner in the US), and journalist and author Andy Worthington, and also includes appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Shakeel Begg, a London-based Imam, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Focusing on the stories of Shaker Aamer, Binyam Mohamed and Omar Deghayes, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” provides a powerful rebuke to those who believe that Guantánamo holds “the worst of the worst” and that the Bush administration was justified in responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by holding men neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects with habeas corpus rights, but as “illegal enemy combatants” with no rights whatsoever.

Throughout the tour, Omar, Andy and Polly (and other speakers) will continue to focus on the plight of Shaker Aamer. To provide more background information, readers may want to know that in December 2009, it emerged in a court case in the UK that British agents witnessed his abuse while he was held in US custody in Afghanistan, and in January 2010, for Harper’s Magazine, law professor Scott Horton reported that he was tortured in Guantánamo on the same night, in June 2006, that three other men appear to have been killed by representatives of an unknown US agency, and that a cover-up then took place, which successfully passed the deaths off as suicides.

Recent feedback

“I thought the film was absolutely brilliant and the most powerful, moving and hard-hitting piece I have seen at the cinema. I admire and congratulate you for your vital work, pioneering the truth and demanding that people sit up and take notice of the outrageous human rights injustices perpetrated against detainees at Guantánamo and other prisons.”
Harriet Wong, Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture

“[T]hought-provoking, harrowing, emotional to watch, touching and politically powerful.”
Harpymarx, blogger

“Last Saturday I went to see Polly Nash and Andy Worthington’s harrowing documentary, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” at London’s BFI. The film knits together narratives so heart-wrenching I half wish I had not heard them. Yet the camaraderie between the detainees and occasional humorous anecdotes … provide a glimpse into the wit, courage and normalcy of the men we are encouraged to perceive as monsters. Nash and Worthington’s film also explores the legal and pragmatic implications of our transatlantic freefall into ethical bankruptcy. It asks how we might navigate our way out of a situation that doesn’t legally exist. The answer is: with great difficulty. With lawyers like Clive Stafford Smith working tirelessly to defend people who have not been accused of a crime and have no evidence against them to refute, the courtroom has become the domain in which we watch the dream of European multiculturalism imploding. Here we see UK Muslims struggle to exert Enlightenment-based Common Law against a so-called civilized, liberal government who would apparently prefer the Magna Carta had never been written.”
Sarah Gillespie, singer/songwriter

For further information, interviews, or to inquire about broadcasting, distributing or showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” please contact Polly Nash or Andy Worthington. For inquiries about screenings, please also feel free to contact Maryam Hassan.

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a Spectacle Production (74 minutes, 2009), and copies of the DVD are now available. As featured on Democracy Now!, ABC News and Truthout. See here for videos of the Q&A session (with Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Andy Worthington and Polly Nash) that followed the launch of the film in London on October 21, 2009.

Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Throughout 2010, former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes and I are touring the UK, showing the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself). The film focuses on the stories of three British residents — Shaker Aamer, Binyam Mohamed and Omar — and throughout the tour we are encouraging audiences to campaign on behalf of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held at Guantánamo, despite being cleared for release in 2007.

Omar and I are primarily encouraging people to write letters to foreign secretary David Miliband, urging him to do more to secure Shaker’s return, and I’m extending this campaign to the internet by reproducing below a letter that readers can cut and paste and send to David Miliband. The letter was drafted by the London Guantánamo Campaign, and I’ve come up with my own edit, but please feel free to come up with your own version.

Further information about Shaker can be found here, here, here and here, and you can also email David Miliband and write to Prime Minister Gordon Brown via an Amnesty International campaign page here. You can also urge your MP to sign an Early Day Motion calling for Shaker’s release, proposed by Shaker’s MP, Martin Linton (you can contact your MP here).

And finally, if you wouldn’t mind spreading the word further, you can follow the advice of Shaker’s solicitor, Gareth Peirce, who told the audience at the NFT for last Saturday’s screening of “Outside the Law” that we should initiate a new campaign, “10 x 10 x 10 for Shaker Aamer,” whereby everyone concerned about this gross miscarriage of justice urges ten people they know to send a letter to David Miliband, and each of these ten people is urged to tell another ten people, and so on.

Please cut and paste the letter below, and feel free to change it as you see fit:

David Miliband MP
Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
King Charles Street
London, SW1A 2AH

Dear Foreign Secretary,

You will be aware that, as of 22 January this year, the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay was still open, despite the fact that one of President Obama’s first pledges as President was to close it by this date. 183 prisoners are still held there, and many of those men, cleared for release by the President’s own task Force, cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured or subjected to other ill-treatment, and are effectively stateless.

The government has succeeded over the past six years in securing the release of all the British nationals held there, and all but one of the British residents. Given our strong relationship with the US, there is far more that the British government could — and should — be doing. You have asserted your commitment to closing Guantánamo Bay, but this has yet to be demonstrated in the case of the final British resident, Shaker Aamer, who was cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2007.

We have been told that the return of Shaker Aamer to his British wife and four British children is being sought, and that discussions between the UK and the US are ongoing. Nevertheless, Shaker is still held, and intervention must be made at the highest levels to secure his release, as happened with other prisoners.

Other European countries have demonstrated over the past year that it is possible to offer new homes to cleared prisoners, even when they have no prior ties to the country. France, for example, having secured the return of its own nationals, accepted two Algerian nationals last year, as well as the family of one of these men, and Albania, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland have also accepted prisoners on a purely humanitarian basis. There are no reasons for the British government not to accept a small number of prisoners on a humanitarian basis to help close Guantánamo Bay.

Over the past eight years, for example, you have argued that there is no basis to accept Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian man who lived in Bournemouth and cannot return to Algeria for fear for his life, because he was a failed asylum seeker. Mr. Belbacha was also cleared for release in 2007, and yet he remains in Guantánamo because no other country will take him, and because the British government, which could so easily offer him a new home, has turned its back on him.

The British government must demonstrate its commitment to democracy, human rights and the rule of law by helping to close down Guantánamo Bay, and it can — and should — do this by pressing for the return of Shaker Aamer, accepting Ahmed Belbacha and accepting other prisoners on a humanitarian basis.

Yours faithfully,

On Friday, prior to a screening at Oxford Brookes University of the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself), Polly and I met up with my old friend, the photographer Adrian Arbib, at the Art Jericho gallery, where his exhibition “Homeland” is showing until March 13. Featuring photos from 20 years of covering campaigns and being involved in them, the centrepiece of the exhibition is a collection of Adrian’s powerful and poignant photos of the Solsbury Hill road protest near Bath in 1994, a pivotal moment in the extraordinary road protest movement of the 1990s, which, as the publicity for the exhibition makes clear, was “an important moment in British political history when a political movement changed government transport policy.”

I first met Adrian in 2003, when he allowed me to reproduce some of his photos in my book Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion, and, when we got back in touch recently, I was delighted to hear that he has collected 71 of his Solsbury Hill photos in a book, Solsbury Hill: Chronicle of a Road Protest, with an accompanying website. I urge anyone with an interest in this remarkable period in the history of environmental direct action — and a unique form of British eco-paganism — to buy the book and visit the website, and I reproduce below some excerpts from Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion that deal with the road protest movement:

[A]nother development that erupted spontaneously in 1992, but that clearly owed much of its impetus to the combination of paganism and political protest conceived by the travelling community and the women of Greenham Common in the 1980s … was the road protest movement, and from the beginning it demonstrated a raw, untutored paganism that went further than any previous protest movement in embracing the concept of the whole of the earth as a sacred landscape.

The story began in February 1992, when two young travellers, a woman called Sam and a man called Steph, pitched camp on Twyford Down near Winchester, an expanse of rolling chalk downland that was both a haven for wildlife and a repository of thousands of years of human history, including ancient tracks and Celtic field systems. The travellers were pleased to discover that this idyllic landscape was ‘the most protected landscape in southern England’, officially designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and they were dismayed when a local rambler told them that an extension to the M3 was shortly to be driven through it. As it turned out, local people had been campaigning against the proposed extension for twenty years, writing letters, submitting petitions, lobbying parliament, mounting legal challenges and contributing to a public inquiry. The road scheme had even been the subject of an official complaint by the European Union, but this too had been ignored by the Department of Transport.

Sam and Steph resolved to take matters into their own hands, setting up a protest camp that immediately began to draw other supporters: ‘travellers, environmentalists, students, pagans, even businessmen and Tory councillors, from all over the country’. The Twyford Down protest was the first outing for the British off-shoot of Earth First!, an American direct action group, and support also came from Friends of the Earth, but it was the passion and ingenuity of the traveller-protestors that was to have the most resounding impact. In the early days, they contented themselves with digging defensive trenches, chaining themselves to earth-moving equipment and forming human chains across the landscape, but as the threat grew more severe, so too did their responses, and they were soon leaping onto moving machinery and hurling themselves into the path of the road-builders’ giant trucks. It was these actions that finally drew the attention of the national press, who soon came up with an apposite name for them — the ‘Dongas Tribe’, derived from a South African word for a track, which had, ironically enough, been given to the ancient tracks that criss-crossed the landscape of Twyford Down by a teacher at the public school in Winchester that had sold the land to the DoT in the first place.

After ten months, the protestors were violently evicted from their camp by Group 4 Security on 9 December 1992, a day that became known as Yellow Wednesday. The naturalist David Bellamy, who had come to Twyford Down as a high profile political campaigner, witnessed the brutal events of that day, and his description echoed the shock experienced by Nick Davies at the Beanfield eight years before: ‘I have been in many protests around the world in some very hairy countries and have never seen such unreasonable force used, especially on women. These boys were putting the boot and fist in and they didn’t care if they were men or women. There were ministry people there but no one tried to call them off. The security men went completely over the top’. All that had changed in eight years, it seemed, was that a quasi-military police force had been replaced by a private security firm that was, if anything, even less accountable for its actions than its predecessors.

Undeterred, the Dongas reformed their protest camp in February 1993, and direct action took place on a daily basis throughout the spring and summer, culminating in a site invasion by over 500 people on 4 July, two days after the DoT and Tarmac were granted a High Court injunction that led to the subsequent imprisonment of ten of the protestors. Significantly, however, their actions had already inspired other people, and throughout the country protest camps sprang up at the site of almost every road project proposed by the government.

In June 1993, for example, protests against the construction of a toll bridge connecting the Isle of Skye to the Scottish mainland combined ecological issues (the destruction of Europe’s second largest otter colony) with the first actions against the newly launched Private Finance Initiative (PFI), whereby the Bank of America bankrolled and profited from the bridge’s construction. That same month, at Cradlewell, the site of a proposed bypass near Newcastle, a group calling themselves the Flowerpot Tribe began a sustained occupation of trees, a tactic that was to become increasingly influential as the protest movement grew.

By September, the campaign had spread to London, where protests against the creation of a link road for the M11 through east London ran for two years, involving the occupation of entire streets of condemned houses and the creation of the ‘Autonomous Area of Wanstonia’ and ‘Leytonstonia’, independent mini-states complete with their own passports. In March 1994, after further large-scale protests at Twyford Down on 28-29 November 1993 and 3 January 1994, the Dongas turned their attention to Solsbury Hill on the outskirts of Bath, an Iron Age hill-fort that was to be cut into by a bypass that would also destroy miles of precious water-meadows and woodland, and in May the first protests against the M65 Blackburn bypass took place, at which tree-houses linked by high-level walkways were set up to protect the ancient woodland and bluebell dells of the Stanworth valley.

In the months before the Criminal Justice Bill was passed, the protests intensified. As the journalist and activist George Monbiot noted, the legislation, which was ‘crude, ill-drafted and repressive’, had succeeded in creating ‘the broadest, and oddest, counter-cultural coalition Britain has ever known’, uniting ‘Hunt saboteurs, peace protestors, football supporters, squatters, radical lawyers, gypsies, pensioners, ravers, disabled rights activists, even an assistant chief constable and a Tory ex-minister’.

5,000 people attended a mass trespass at Twyford Down on 2 July 1994, and another large demonstration took place on 18 July in Norfolk, where protestors calling themselves ‘The Lizard Tribe’ had been campaigning for a year against an expansion of the A11. In August, a protest camp was established on the Pollok Estate in Glasgow (‘Pollok Free State’) to protect a city amenity space from the development of the M77, and in September protests began against a new stretch of the A30 in Devon, including, at the Fairmile camp, the first instance of elaborate underground tunnels that would collapse on the occupants if heavy machinery was deployed. In July and October, national demonstrations against the Bill in London drew crowds of over 100,000 people, and on 3 November, the day that it became law, numerous protests took place across the country, including an invasion of the M11 construction site by over 300 protestors.

My visit to the exhibition on Friday was a vivid reminder of the powerful grass-roots political movements in the UK in the years when John Major was Prime Minister, and it made me think, sadly, that the revolutionary spirit of Albion, which surfaced in those years in the road protest movement, the free party scene, Reclaim the Streets, a revival of the 17th century Diggers movement and the struggle for access to Stonehenge, seems to have been asleep since Tony Blair wielded his psychic cosh on the British people in 1997, when unfettered greed was revitalized, a lawless “War on Terror” did to civil liberties and human rights what Margaret Thatcher would never have considered possible (or even, in some cases, acceptable), an illegal war was launched with impunity, and materialism and self-obsession became society’s dominant traits.

Note: For related articles, see: Stonehenge and the summer solstice: past and present (June 2008), Remember the Battle of the Beanfield (in the Guardian, June 2009) and a related article here, and It’s 25 Years Since The Last Stonehenge Free Festival (June 2009).

Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Over on Crooks and Liars, Nicole Belle located a recent interview I did with George Galloway on his TalkSPORT radio show, which I hadn’t realized was online. The nine-minute interview, recorded in a slightly Alan Partridgesque manner while I was sitting in the breakfast room of a Premier Inn in York, where I was staying for the night prior to an appearance on BBC1’s “The Big Questions”, came after the Court of Appeal delivered a resounding victory for accountability and open justice by ordering the government to release a summary of documents revealing how US agents had tortured the British resident Binyam Mohamed while he was held in Pakistan in 2002 — and how the British knew about it, but did nothing about it. Foreign secretary David Miliband had been arguing for 18 months that the release of the summary, written by two High Court judges, would threaten the intelligence-sharing relationship between the UK and the US, but the Court of Appeal was not persuaded — and, for good measure, Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, made a point of declaring that he did not believe MI5 could be trusted when it came to reports of its dealings with Mohamed.

The broadcast, located by Nicole, is posted below:

Nicole will be hosting a book chat about The Guantánamo Files on Crooks and Liars in the near future, but in the meantime, she also wrote the following (and then kindly cross-posted from my current fundraising appeal):

I don’t know that there is anyone on this planet who knows more about what went on at Guantánamo than independent journalist Andy Worthington, and that includes those inside the administration. Through incredibly hard work, diligence and a mountain of FOIA information, Andy has been chronicling this deepest, darkest chapter of American history.

Andy has written a book, The Guantánamo Files, that I am reading now and on which I will be hosting a book chat in the very near future. I can’t lie, it’s taking me longer to read it than it should, because I have to keep putting it down. There’s not a chapter I’ve read that I haven’t wanted to scream, “This should never have happened! This is not what a democratic country does! NOT IN MY NAME!” It is a detailed and unblinking look at not only a strange mixture of fear and incompetence, but of real evil as well.

Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Last Wednesday, when the Spanish government announced that the first of up to five cleared Guantánamo prisoners to be offered new homes in Spain had arrived in the country (and three other men were given new homes in Albania), I noted that, although the Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba told reporters that the man is Palestinian, he refused to give his name, citing privacy concerns.

This was not unusual. Although the identities of two Algerians released in France last year, and two Uzbeks released in Ireland had been publicly revealed (as, by accident, had the identities of two Syrians released in Portugal), the trend was towards anonymity, to allow these men to attempt to build new lives in peace, without the stigma attached to anyone who has been held in Guantánamo. Anonymity was preserved with the unidentified man released in Belgium in October, the Palestinian released in Hungary in December, the three unidentified men released in Slovakia in January, and the Uzbek released in Switzerland, also this January.

However, as the Spanish journalist Carlos Sardiña Galache explained to me last week, “All the Spanish press is covering the news of the Guantánamo prisoner released here.” He added that a month ago, El Mundo — the country’s second biggest newspaper — claimed that the ex-prisoner in question was Walid Hijazi (identified in Guantánamo as Assem Matruq al-Aasmi), who was born in 1980 and is originally from the town of Khan Younis in Gaza.

In a rather snide article, originally entitled, as Galache explained, “El ‘regalito’ que nos llega de Guantánamo” (“The ‘present’ that comes from Guantánamo”), El Mundo attempted to cast doubts on Hijazi’s suitability for resettlement, hinting at connections to al-Qaeda, which, presumably, had been lifted from the untested allegations that are publicly available on the Pentagon’s website, or on the New York Times’ Guantánamo Docket, where the Pentagon documents on each prisoner are made available, but without any analysis.

Last Wednesday, the Associated Press confirmed that the released Palestinian was Walid Hijazi. A relative explained that the family “received a message Tuesday saying Hijazi had been released and sent to Spain.” The relative added that “Hijazi left Gaza in 2000, ostensibly for a pilgrimage to Mecca and that the family lost touch with him after that. In 2003, the family was informed by the Red Cross that he was in Guantánamo, and since then, it had received messages from him every three or four months.”

In light of these revelations, I thought it might be useful to place what is known about Hijazi in context. As I explained in an article last year, Hijazi “was typical of many of the Guantánamo prisoners.” Recruited to travel to Afghanistan to assist the Taliban at a mosque in Saudi Arabia, when he may, indeed, have been preyed on by recruiters during a pilgrimage to Mecca, “he traveled to Afghanistan on a well-worn route via Iran, and arrived at al-Farouq (the main training camp for Arabs, established by the Afghan warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf in the early 1990s, but associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before 9/11) just two weeks before the 9/11 attacks.”

As I also explained:

In interrogation, [Hijazi] explained that he had never fired a weapon except in training, and that when al-Farouq closed, he was sent to Khost, near the Pakistani border, where he stayed in a tent for two months, along with “Taliban fighters coming back and forth from the front lines and people like him waiting for further instructions.” He was then injured in an accident involving a hand grenade, taken to a clinic in Khost, and smuggled across the border to a hospital in Pakistan, where a pin was placed in his leg, and he was eventually seized by the Pakistani authorities.

Those seeking connections with al-Qaeda will undoubtedly pick up on the fact that al-Farouq was associated with bin Laden, but the truth is that thousands of recruits passed through the camp, and few ever met al-Qaeda’s leader. The most that the majority of recruits could expect would be to see him from afar during the occasions when he stopped by to deliver a speech. In addition, the majority of those who attended al-Farouq either returned home after training, joined units fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, in an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the 9/11 attacks and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism, or took up supportive roles as cooks or guards.

As a new recruit, who spent only two weeks at the camp, Hijazi would not even have advanced beyond the most cursory training, as he explained, and the fact that he was then evacuated via Khost instead of being shepherded like other recruits to the Tora Bora mountains, where a showdown between the remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban and the US military’s Afghan allies took place in November and December 2001 indicates that he was as close to a nobody as it was possible to be, having spent just a fortnight at a training camp.

Almost certainly sold to US forces by opportunistic Pakistanis who picked him up from the hospital in Pakistan (and no doubt received a bounty payment as a result), Hijazi would barely have made the grade as a prisoner of war protected by the Geneva Conventions (having never engaged US forces in combat), and his long imprisonment in Guantánamo as an “enemy combatant” — essentially a “terror suspect” without rights — was therefore as ludicrous and as unjust as it was for the majority of the men held at Guantánamo who had no connection to terrorism.

The Spanish people should have no doubt that this young man, who was just out of his teens when seized, poses no threat whatsoever. The Obama administration — which is demonstrably cautious in releasing prisoners — would not have freed him otherwise, and instead of trying to vilify him, it would make more sense for the Spanish media to leave him alone to rebuild his life, and to recall that not only was he subjected to a peculiarly aberrant detention program that no civilized country should tolerate, but also that he is now in a strange land, with no relatives around to help him recover, and is probably struggling to come to terms with the knowledge that Guantánamo may well haunt him for the rest of his life.

(‘’)

Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

See the following for articles about the 142 prisoners released from Guantánamo from June 2007 to January 2009, and the 48 prisoners released from February 2009 to January 2010, whose stories are covered in more detail than is available anywhere else –- either in print or on the Internet –- although many of them, of course, are also covered in The Guantánamo Files: June 2007 –- 2 Tunisians, 4 Yemenis (here, here and here); July 2007 –- 16 Saudis; August 2007 –- 1 Bahraini, 5 Afghans; September 2007 –- 16 Saudis; September 2007 –- 1 Mauritanian; September 2007 –- 1 Libyan, 1 Yemeni, 6 Afghans; November 2007 –- 3 Jordanians, 8 Afghans; November 2007 –- 14 Saudis; December 2007 –- 2 Sudanese; December 2007 –- 13 Afghans (here and here); December 2007 –- 3 British residents; December 2007 –- 10 Saudis; May 2008 –- 3 Sudanese, 1 Moroccan, 5 Afghans (here, here and here); July 2008 –- 2 Algerians; July 2008 –- 1 Qatari, 1 United Arab Emirati, 1 Afghan; August 2008 –- 2 Algerians; September 2008 –- 1 Pakistani, 2 Afghans (here and here); September 2008 –- 1 Sudanese, 1 Algerian; November 2008 –- 1 Kazakh, 1 Somali, 1 Tajik; November 2008 –- 2 Algerians; November 2008 –- 1 Yemeni (Salim Hamdan) repatriated to serve out the last month of his sentence; December 2008 –- 3 Bosnian Algerians; January 2009 –- 1 Afghan, 1 Algerian, 4 Iraqis; ; February 2009 — 1 British resident (Binyam Mohamed); May 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian (Lakhdar Boumediene); June 2009 — 1 Chadian (Mohammed El-Gharani), 4 Uighurs to Bermuda, 1 Iraqi, 3 Saudis (here and here); August 2009 — 1 Afghan (Mohamed Jawad), 2 Syrians to Portugal; September 2009 — 1 Yemeni, 2 Uzbeks to Ireland (here and here); October 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti, 1 prisoner of undisclosed nationality to Belgium; October 2009 — 6 Uighurs to Palau; November 2009 — 1 Bosnian Algerian to France, 1 unidentified Palestinian to Hungary, 2 Tunisians to Italian custody; December 2009 — 1 Kuwaiti (Fouad al-Rabiah); December 2009 — 2 Somalis, 4 Afghans, 6 Yemenis; January 2010 — 2 Algerians, 3 prisoners of undisclosed nationality to Slovakia, 1 unidentified Uzbek to Switzerland.

Please support my work!

On Monday, I put out an appeal for financial support for my ongoing quest to expose the dark truths about Guantánamo and the “War on Terror,” which, for the last four years, has involved a concerted and consistent effort to fight back against the Bush administration’s insidiously successful rhetoric of fear and vengeance, and I’m renewing that appeal today.

My thanks to those who have contributed over the last few days, and if you’d like to join them, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. All contributions are welcome. Readers can pay 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).

As I have demonstrated time and again — and will continue to do so, with your help — Guantánamo was never a prison that contained “the worst of the worst,” but was, instead, a mistake of colossal proportions, in which at least 95 percent of those held had no connection to al-Qaeda or international terrorism, and were either completely innocent men, seized by the US military’s allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, at a time when substantial bounty payments were widespread, or Taliban recruits, urged by sheikhs and facilitators in the Gulf to travel to Afghanistan to help the Taliban in its long-running civil war with the Northern Alliance.

Throughout all my work, I have attempted to bring the men’s stories to life, to overcome the general lack of interest in the mainstream media, and to insist that the vile innovations of the Bush administration — holding men neither as prisoners of war or as criminal suspects, but as a novel category of human being without rights, and introducing torture as an illegal, morally repugnant and useless way of making them talk — must be brought to an end, and that those responsible for implementing torture must be held to account, as stipulated by the UN Convention Against Torture.

When President Obama came into office last January, I believed, like many others, that Guantánamo would be closed within a year, but that has not happened, and, if anything, the struggle to highlight the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo is now harder than ever. Your financial support will help me to continue with this work — and also to continue calling for senior Bush administration officials to be held accountable for their actions, and to continue researching other stories, in particular those of “America’s Disappeared” — the men held in the CIA’s secret prisons, whose whereabouts have not been disclosed by the Obama administration, which still insists on looking forward, rather than dealing with the crimes of the recent past.

As I mentioned on Monday, if you can’t help out with a donation, please be aware that my book The Guantánamo Files (and my two previous books, The Battle of the Beanfield and Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion) are all available to buy from me if you’re in the UK (and are available elsewhere through Amazon and other retailers), and that copies of my documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash) are available on DVD, and can be dispatched anywhere in the world. As I also mentioned on Monday, any financial assistance you can provide will help me to cover the ongoing costs of taking the film on a UK tour without any financial backing.

Thanks for your continued support.

Andy Worthington
London
March 3, 2010

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Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

On Saturday afternoon, a packed house at the National Film Theatre watched the new Guantánamo documentary, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by filmmaker Polly Nash and myself), in a screening organized by the BFI (British Film Institute). Afterwards, in a Q&A session filmed by the production company Spectacle (which will be online soon), and admirably chaired by the journalist and broadcaster Victoria Brittain, the UK’s most celebrated human rights lawyer, Gareth Peirce, delivered a passionate call to action, asking the audience to overcome the UK’s prevailing political apathy, and to campaign on behalf of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo — and the focus of the film, along with released prisoners Binyam Mohamed and Omar Deghayes.

An innocent man with a British wife and four British children, Shaker was cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2007 (when the British government first asked for his return to the UK), but continues to be held not because of any involvement with terrorism, but because of what he knows about the dark workings of Guantánamo, as the most articulate and committed defender of the prisoners’ rights. Disturbingly, it suits both the British and the American government to return Shaker to Saudi Arabia, the country of his birth, where he will be deprived of the opportunity to speak out, and will also be prevented from acting as a witness in court cases against both governments.

“10 x 10 x 10 for Shaker Aamer”: An instant campaign

In a rousing attempt to encourage the kind of concerted activity that is required to effect political change, Gareth not only encouraged the audience to send letters to foreign secretary David Miliband, demanding the immediate return of Shaker to the UK — through a campaign organized by Amnesty International — but also initiated a new campaign, “10 x 10 x 10 for Shaker Aamer” (which I think Gareth came up with on the day), whereby everyone concerned about this gross miscarriage of justice urges ten people they know to send a letter to David Miliband, and each of these ten people is urged to tell another ten people, and so on. Please try it, and also please encourage your MP to sign an Early Day Motion, introduced by Shaker’s MP, Martin Linton, calling for his immediate return to the UK. You can contact your MP here.

In the rest of the Q&A session, I addressed questions raised about the future of Guantánamo, and accountability for those who approved the use of torture. This has a particular resonance in the UK right now, as the government struggles to cope with recent revelations about its complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, and also, for different reasons, in the US, where, scandalously, a senior lawyer in the Justice Department recently overruled the findings of a four-year investigation into the behaviour of John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, the lawyers responsible for attempting to redefine torture, and to approve its use by the CIA. The report recommended that they should be punished for “professional misconduct,” but in the watered-down version they were merely criticized for exercising “poor judgment.”

After the Q&A, the majority of the audience convened in a conference room upstairs, where HHUGS (Helping Households Under Great Stress), the Institute of Race Relations, the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign (based in Shaker’s home borough of Wandsworth), Spectacle and I all had stalls, and there was a further opportunity to discuss strategies for the future, including the campaign to bring an end to Britain’s own version of Guantánamo, the system of control orders and deportation bail that was introduced in 2005, when the previous regime — imprisonment without charge or trial — was ruled illegal by the Law Lords.

This was a genuinely inspiring afternoon, and I’d like to thank David Somerset of the BFI for organizing it, and Victoria and Gareth for taking part.

Screening at the LSE, Monday March 1

On Monday evening, a good-sized crowd watched “Outside the Law” as the centerpiece of LSE Amnesty International Society’s Human Rights Week 2010. I’m delighted to report that Omar Deghayes was present for the post-screening Q&A, along with myself and Polly, and that we also had a special guest, Michel Paradis, a civilian defense lawyer in the US Defense Department, who is assigned to the Military Commissions, and is currently appealing the life sentence received by Ali Hamza al-Bahlul after a one-sided show trial in October 2008.

Again, we had a lively discussion after the film, even though, to be honest, none of us could see any easy way for Guantánamo to close in the imminent future, as President Obama lost the momentum he had when he came into office, and now seems to be floundering. However, we were, at least, able to push the message about Shaker Aamer, and I’m delighted to report that a stack of letters to David Miliband were taken away by those present, as were letters to Canadian PM Stephen Harper, asking the Canadian government to bring to an end its unprincipled refusal to call for the return from Guantánamo of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was just 15 years old when he was seized, and who, to Obama’s eternal shame, has been put forward for a trial by Military Commission.

Feedback from the NFT screening

“I thought the film was absolutely brilliant and the most powerful, moving and hard-hitting piece I have seen at the cinema. I admire and congratulate you for your vital work, pioneering the truth and demanding that people sit up and take notice of the outrageous human rights injustices perpetrated against detainees at Guantánamo and other prisons.”
Harriet Wong, Medical Foundation for Care of Victims of Torture

“[T]hought-provoking, harrowing, emotional to watch, touching and politically powerful.”
Harpymarx, blogger

About the film and the UK tour

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is currently on a UK tour, with Omar Degahyes and Andy Worthington appearing in person, to attend post-screening Q&A sessions. On some dates, Omar, who is now the legal director of the Guantánamo Justice Centre, and Andy will be joined by Polly Nash and, occasionally, other guests.

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” tells the story of Guantánamo (and includes sections on extraordinary rendition and secret prisons) with a particular focus on how the Bush administration turned its back on domestic and international laws, how prisoners were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan without adequate screening (and often for bounty payments), and why some of these men may have been in Afghanistan or Pakistan for reasons unconnected with militancy or terrorism (as missionaries or humanitarian aid workers, for example).

The film is based around interviews with former prisoners (Moazzam Begg and, in his first major interview, Omar Deghayes, who was released in December 2007), lawyers for the prisoners (Clive Stafford Smith in the UK and Tom Wilner in the US), and journalist and author Andy Worthington, and also includes appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Shakeel Begg, a London-based Imam, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Focusing on the stories of Shaker Aamer, Binyam Mohamed and Omar Deghayes, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” provides a powerful rebuke to those who believe that Guantánamo holds “the worst of the worst” and that the Bush administration was justified in responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by holding men neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects with habeas corpus rights, but as “illegal enemy combatants” with no rights whatsoever.

Throughout the tour, Omar, Andy and Polly (and other speakers) will continue to focus on the plight of Shaker Aamer. To provide more background information, readers may want to know that in December 2009, it emerged in a court case in the UK that British agents witnessed his abuse while he was held in US custody in Afghanistan, and in January 2010, for Harper’s Magazine, law professor Scott Horton reported that he was tortured in Guantánamo on the same night, in June 2006, that three other men appear to have been killed by representatives of an unknown US agency, and that a cover-up then took place, which successfully passed the deaths off as suicides.

Please also visit this page for a video of Shaker’s daughter Johina handing in a letter to Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street on January 11, 2010.

Other recent feedback

“The film was great — not because I was in it, but because it told the legal and human story of Guantánamo more clearly than anything I have seen.”
Tom Wilner, US attorney who represented the Guantánamo prisoners before the US Supreme Court

“The film was fantastic! It has the unique ability of humanizing those who were detained at Guantánamo like no other I have seen.”
Sari Gelzer, Truthout

“Engaging and moving, and personal. The first [film] to really take you through the lives of the men from their own eyes.”
Debra Sweet, The World Can’t Wait

“I am part of a community of folks from the US who attempted to visit the Guantánamo prison in December 2005, and ended up fasting for a number of days outside the gates. We went then, and we continue our work now, because we heard the cries for justice from within the prison walls. As we gathered tonight as a community, we watched “Outside the Law,” and by the end, we all sat silent, many with tears in our eyes and on our faces. I have so much I’d like to say, but for now I wanted to write a quick note to say how grateful we are that you are out, and that you are speaking out with such profound humanity. I am only sorry what we can do is so little, and that so many remain in the prison.”
Matt Daloisio, Witness Against Torture

For further information, interviews, or to inquire about broadcasting, distributing or showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” please contact Polly Nash or Andy Worthington. For inquiries about screenings, please also feel free to contact Maryam Hassan.

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a Spectacle Production (74 minutes, 2009), and copies of the DVD are now available. As featured on Democracy Now!, ABC News and Truthout. See here for videos of the Q&A session (with Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Andy Worthington and Polly Nash) that followed the launch of the film in London on October 21, 2009.

(‘’)

Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

When it comes to dealing with the thorny question of how to close Guantánamo, the remaining prisoners have been caught between two competing systems since President Obama took office last January, and the result, to put it mildly, has been confusing.

Under President Bush, prisoners were cleared for release by military review boards, established to review the supposed evidence against them, and to determine whether they constituted an ongoing threat to the US. This appeared to be a maddeningly arbitrary system, but it led to the release of hundreds of the prisoners.

In June 2008, the Supreme Court added a second layer of review, of a more substantial nature, when it gave the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to challenge the basis of their detention in a US court. This right had been established by the Supreme Court in June 2004, leading to the filing of habeas petitions on behalf of the majority of the prisoners, but these were all stalled when Congress submitted to the President’s wishes and passed legislation that purported to strip the prisoners of these rights, in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Guantánamo and habeas corpus under George W. Bush

Following the Supreme Court ruling in June 2008, District Court judges began hearing the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, and the prisoners secured, for the first time, an objective review of what the government claimed to be evidence proving that they were connected to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. The result was a disappointment for the government, although it came as no surprise to those who had been studying Guantánamo closely, and who knew that the majority of the prisoners had been seized by America’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when substantial bounty payments were being offered, and that the majority of the supposed evidence against the men came from their own interrogations, or those of other prisoners, which were often conducted in conditions where torture, coercion or bribery were prevalent.

From October 2008 to January 2009, 23 prisoners won their habeas petitions, and just three cases were won by the government. In the case of 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), the government gave up all pretense that they were “enemy combatants,” having established, soon after they were seized in December 2001, that their only enemy was the Chinese government, and having suffered a humiliating court defeat shortly after the Supreme Court ruling last June. A judge also dismissed the government’s claims against five Algerian-born Bosnian citizens, who had been kidnapped by US agents from Sarajevo in January 2002, in connection with a non-existent plot to bomb the US embassy, and the case against a Chadian national, who was a child at the time of his capture by Pakistani police in a raid on a mosque in Karachi.

In both cases, the judge — Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush — dismissed the government’s supposed evidence by ruling, in the case of the Bosnians, that a supposed informer was unreliable, and in the case of the former child prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, that unreliable witnesses in Guantánamo (whose unreliability was known to the authorities) had concocted a fictional story about him.

Judge Leon also ruled that the government had established a case against one of the Bosnians — in connection with purported plans to recruit men to fight in Afghanistan — and against two other prisoners with supposed connections to the Taliban or al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but it was a poor start for the government’s defense of its rationale for holding men for seven years without charge or trial, and these same problems resurfaced under Barack Obama.

Guantánamo and habeas corpus under Barack Obama

In Obama’s first year in office, nine prisoners won their habeas petitions, and six lost. Those who won included a Syrian who had been tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy, an Afghan (also a child at the time of capture) whose confessions were tainted by threats of torture, and a Kuwaiti businessman who had been tortured in Guantánamo until he came up with false confessions that were only finally exposed by a judge last September. In all these cases, false confessions and unreliable witnesses fatally undermined the government’s case.

Moreover, in the majority of cases that the government won, the fault lines in the Bush administration’s rationale for defining men as “enemy combatants” became apparent: most were, at best, peripheral characters in the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance that preceded al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and should, by any objective measure, have been held as enemy prisoners of war, and protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Although the majority of the nine prisoners who lost their habeas petitions were cast back into the unprecedented world of indefinite detention conceived by the Bush administration, awaiting a substantial overhaul of the very basis of detention policies in the “War on Terror” that has not yet happened, it was clear that the courts provided the first objective review of the Bush administration’s policies. It muddied the waters, therefore, when President Obama established an interagency Task Force to review all the prisoners’ cases, and to come up with its own conclusions about who should be released, and who should be put on trial.

Obama’s Task Force muddies the waters

The Task Force struggled to pull together information about the prisoners that was scattered throughout various department and agencies, and took until January this year to complete its findings, advising the President that 35 prisoners should be put forward for trials, that 47 should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and that the rest — around 110 prisoners at the time — should be released.

The announcement revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses of the review process. It was, of course, heartening that only 35 prisoners would face trials, as this figure corresponded to analyses revealed by intelligence officials over the previous eight years, demonstrating that less than 5 percent of the 779 prisoners held throughout Guantánamo’s history had any meaningful connection to al-Qaeda, the Taliban leadership or international terrorism. Similarly, the decision to release 110 men was a swifter judgment than the courts were able to achieve — although it should be noted that the progress of the habeas petitions was severely obstructed by the Justice Department, where lawyers dragged their heels providing necessary information to the defense, and also that an executive decision to release a prisoner did not carry the weight of a court verdict, and did not, crucially, remove the stigma of having been held for years as an “enemy combatant.”

However, the biggest disappointment was the Task Force’s recommendation that 47 men be held indefinitely without charge or trial. “Preventive detention” was at the heart of the Bush administration’s baleful experiment in holding prisoners neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trial on charges related to terrorism, and it was profoundly disturbing to hear President Obama explain, as he did in May last year, that the men in question were those who “cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.” Essentially, what this statement revealed was that the administration was prepared to rely on information obtained through torture as a reason for continuing indefinite detention without charge or trial.

Moreover, the Task Force’s announcement in January — and Obama’s apparent endorsement of it — also ignored the role of the courts, for the simple reason that the majority of these men had outstanding habeas corpus petitions, and that, as a result, it was up to the District Court judges, and not the executive, to decide whether the supposed evidence against them was at all reliable.

Such is the muddle created by the Task Force — and such is the secrecy surrounding its decisions — that it is impossible to know whether the nine men consigned to indefinite detention after losing their habeas petitions in the courts are included in the 47 men that the Task Force advised should be held indefinitely. I can only presume that this is the case, but, as events last week showed, we are now in a position where rulings on prisoners’ habeas petitions no longer stand independently, but are actively compared to the results reached by a Task Force whose findings are secret.

The latest habeas corpus rulings

Last week, judges ruled on the habeas petitions of three Yemeni prisoners. The unclassified opinions have not yet been released, so the judges’ reasoning is not yet available, but in two cases the prisoner’s habeas petitions were denied, and in the third case the petition was granted. The two men who lost their petitions are Suleiman al-Nahdi and Fahmi al-Assani, and the man who won was Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman. To confuse matters further, both al-Nahdi and al-Assani had been cleared by a Bush-era military review board, while Uthman had not. It is, of course, not known what decision had been reached by the Task Force regarding these men.

Although the judges’ unclassified opinions are not yet available, a glance at these men’s stories, as available through publicly accessible Pentagon documents, indicates how the decisions may have been made. As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, Uthman, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, “said that he had traveled between Kabul and Khost teaching the Koran from March to December 2001.” Although he “admitted that he had stayed at a Taliban house in Quetta, Pakistan, which was the normal entry point for volunteers who had come to fight with the Taliban,” he stated that this was “only because he had been told that it was the only way for him to enter Afghanistan.”

If Uthman had a plausible argument that he had traveled to Afghanistan as a missionary, this was not the case with al-Nahdi and al-Assani. Both had been seized in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan (where a major showdown between al-Qaeda and the US military’s Afghan proxies had taken place in November and December 2001), and, although it is clear from the cases of many of the men held at Guantánamo that passing through Tora Bora to escape the chaos of Afghanistan did not prove that they were involved in any kind of military activity (because thousands of civilians were also trying to escape), both men came up with accounts which suggested that they were at least peripherally involved in the conflict.

As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, al-Assani, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture:

was a recent recruit to the Taliban cause, a foot soldier in an inter-Muslim civil war that had suddenly gone global. He traveled to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001, trained briefly at al-Farouq [a training camp established by an Afghan warlord but associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before the 9/11 attacks] and ended up in Tora Bora, but only, he said, because “I was fleeing for my life with many other people to avoid the bombing that was imminent,” and not, as was alleged, because he “was assigned to augment Taliban and al-Qaeda forces already in defensive positions in Tora Bora.” He added that he was with a group of Pakistanis, trying to get to Pakistan, when they were bombed by US forces and he was “the sole survivor.”

He was then taken by Afghan forces to a hospital in Jalalabad, and delivered to US forces some months later.

Al-Nahdi, who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, explained that he had been inspired to assist the Taliban through a fatwa issued by a notorious cleric, and had spent a month at al-Farouq. He added that:

[He] saw Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, when he “talked about the jihad for approximately one hour and then a senior al-Qaeda operative [identified as Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s No. 2] made a few comments,” and then went into the mountains, where he took turns guarding a foxhole with 15 other people. Responding to an allegation that he “may have fought in Tora Bora,” he said, “I never fired a weapon. I was only sitting,” and, when asked if he would have shot at Americans, he [said]: “I did not see any Americans. If I had seen any Americans, I would not have shot at them. I would have only shot at them if they had shot at me first, to defend myself.”

Guantánamo’s continuing existence as a legal black hole

Over eight years after Guantánamo opened, it is clear from these three rulings that the fate of the men in question is still dictated more by the disgraceful innovations of the Bush administration than it is by any objective notions of justice. Othman may be released, but only when the Obama administration decides that it is politically safe to free any cleared Yemeni prisoners (having capitulated to unprincipled criticism following the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt by suspending all releases to Yemen until further notice). Moreover, it is impossible to know whether any of these three men were cleared for release by Obama’s Task Force, and, if so, what it means if a prisoner loses his habeas petition, when the Task Force had recommended his release.

Behind all this, of course, lies the problem that I have been highlighting ever since Judge Leon ruled, last January, that Ghaleb al-Bihani, another Yemeni, could continue to be held indefinitely because he had worked as a cook for Arab forces supporting the Taliban, and had not magically spirited himself out of Afghanistan on the day that the US-led invasion began, in October 2001. Absurdly, it seems to me, this was when the Taliban’s civil war with the Northern Alliance suddenly became a “War on Terror,” in which US forces, who hooked up with the Northern Alliance after years of indifference to their cause, were conventional soldiers, but those who opposed them were terrorists.

If there were truly any justice, Ghaleb al-Bihani — and Suleiman al-Nahdi and Fahmi al-Assani — would have been held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions, and not as special “War on Terror” prisoners whose detention was endorsed by Congress in the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which empowered the President to seize and hold anyone he regarded as having a connection to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. Crucially, this would mean that they could continue to be held until the end of hostilities (whenever that may be), but it would also mean that they would not have been subjected to the abusive innovations of the “War on Terror,” and would have been shielded from coercive interrogations and “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

I have serious doubts about whether it is acceptable to continue holding peripheral figures seized during the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 for longer than the duration of the Second World War, but even if this were the case, no one in the Executive branch, Congress or the judiciary has fully addressed the fact that, instead, they are still effectively in the black hole dreamed up by the Bush administration when the President accepted, in February 2002, that he had the right to hold a new category of human being — “enemy combatants” without rights — outside the Geneva Conventions.

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Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on AlterNet, The Public Record, Campaign for Liberty, Prison Planet, Global Research, Doom Daily, USWGO, PuppetGov.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases, see: Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: the most important habeas corpus case in modern history and Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened? (both December 2007), The Supreme Court’s Guantánamo ruling: what does it mean? (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (Uighurs’ first court victory, June 2008), What’s Happening with the Guantánamo cases? (July 2008), Government Says Six Years Is Not Long Enough To Prepare Evidence (September 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims (November 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (January 2009), No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (January 2009), Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (January 2009), How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (January 2009), Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants (March 2009), Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (April 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (July 2009), Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think (July 2009), How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad, July 2009), Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave (August 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame (August 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame (August 2009), No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings (September 2009), First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling (September 2009), A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (September 2009), 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantánamo Lawyer (November 2009), Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere) (November 2009), Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait (December 2009), What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo? (December 2009), “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition (December 2009), Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit (December 2009), Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois (December 2009), Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010).

Also see: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror (April 2009), Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights (July 2009), Bagram Isn’t The New Guantánamo, It’s The Old Guantánamo (August 2009), Obama Brings Guantánamo And Rendition To Bagram (And Not The Geneva Conventions) and Is Bagram Obama’s New Secret Prison? (both September 2009).

Please support my work!

Every three months I appeal for financial support to help me to continue the full-time work I began exactly four years ago, when I started researching and writing about the stories of the prisoners held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and first realized the scale of the injustice and brutality of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

If you can help out at all, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. All contributions are welcome. Readers can pay 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).

My life as a full-time chronicler and analyst of Guantánamo and the “War on Terror” began with the 14 months I spent researching and writing my book The Guantánamo Files, which (with additional chapters published online) tells the stories of the 779 prisoners who have been held at Guantánamo throughout its eight-year history. I then began writing articles following developments at Guantánamo, helping to spread the word through various websites, and am delighted to report that my website now receives an average of 150,000 page views a month.

My thanks to all who have discovered my work, and especially to those who follow it on a regular basis. Three months ago, despite stalling and compromises on the part of the Obama administration, I thought that we were at least still proceeding in the right direction, but the last few months have proved me wrong, and have demonstrated that a huge amount of work still needs to be done. This is where your help — reading my work, helping to get it out to other people and providing financial support to enable me to keep spreading the word — is so important.

The one-year deadline that President Obama set for the closure of Guantánamo has passed, those who oppose the prison’s closure appear to have gained the upper hand in an ongoing propaganda war, and the administration has made numerous fundamental mistakes: failing to provide new homes on the US mainland for cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture, reviving the Bush administration’s reviled Military Commission trial system, and insisting that it has the right to hold some prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial.

With widespread indifference in the mainstream media, my mission — to educate people about the terrible mistakes that have been made, and the human cost of those mistakes — continues, not just with regard to Guantánamo, but also in researching the “ghost prisoners” of the CIA’s secret detention program (whose whereabouts are largely unaccounted for), exposing the baleful history of the prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, calling for accountability for those who made America a “Torture Nation,” and exposing British complicity in torture and the injustice of my home country’s own anti-terror laws.

In the last three months, I have updated my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, produced an annotated version of the first ever Bagram prisoner list, and published five articles listing all my work in chronological order, as well as reporting the stories of the prisoners released from Guantánamo, reporting on their habeas corpus petitions in the US courts, exposing right-wing lies and misinformation, and the spinelessness of many Democrats, and criticizing the administration for its inability to place principles above pragmatism.

As this story moves forward, I am grateful to the various organizations who support my work financially (primarily, Truthout and the Future of Freedom Foundation, but also the Guardian, Cageprisoners and the Daily Star, Lebanon). However, most of the work I do is still unpaid — not only the majority of the 90 or so articles I have written over the last three months, but also the promotion I am undertaking for my documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash), which I am taking on a UK tour with former prisoner Omar Deghayes. The tour, like so much of my work, has no financial backing, so any assistance will be appreciated.

In conclusion, if you can’t help out with a donation, please be aware that my book The Guantánamo Files (and my two previous books, The Battle of the Beanfield and Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion) are all available to buy from me if you’re in the UK (and are available elsewhere through Amazon and other retailers), and that copies of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” are available on DVD, and can be dispatched anywhere in the world.

Thank you for being here, and for your continued support of my work.

Andy Worthington
London
March 1, 2010

Andy Worthington is 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). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.