Archive for January, 2011

On January 11, I was one of several speakers at a rally to mark the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo outside The White House (organized by, and including speakers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Witness Against Torture, Amnesty International USA, and September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows), as well as other groups, including The World Can’t Wait. The other speakers, as mentioned here, were Tom Parker, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy and policy director of terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights, Pardiss Kebriaei, Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney representing men detained at Guantánamo, Valerie Lucznikowska of September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Frida Berrigan of Witness Against Torture, and peace activist Kathy Kelly reading out a statement by former prisoner Omar Deghayes. For more on the context of the days calls for urgent action from President Obama, Congress and the American people, see my article, The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo.

All the speeches were filmed by a number of media organizations and individuals, and I hope to make footage of the entire rally available soon, but in the meantime I’m posting below a short report by Press TV, featuring a brief clip of my speech, and part of an interview outside the Department of Justice, following a procession of 173 hooded protestors in orange jumpsuits who had walked from The White House, as well as a clip of Valerie Lucznikowska’s speech:

More extensive coverage of the protest outside the Department of Justice, including a short speech I gave, and other interviews and speeches (with peace activists Ruth Hooke and Ray McGovern, and peace poet Luke Nephew), filmed by the wonderfully dedicated activist Bill Hughes, is below:

Note: The photo at the top of this article (click to enlarge) is by Sarah Hogarth, whose many photos of the day’s protests are available here, and I hope to be posting some of my favorite images in a separate article soon.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

On Monday January 10, during my short US tour, on the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, which was designed to publicize the plight of the remaining 173 prisoners, who have been largely abandoned by the law, and by the Obama administration (see “The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo“), I spent the morning in Washington D.C., having travelled there from New York the evening before with Debra Sweet, the National Director of The World Can’t Wait, who organized my trip to the US. At lunchtime on Tuesday, I met with Guantánamo attorneys to discuss possible strategies for the year ahead, and was then picked up by the prolific blogger and activist David Swanson, and taken to Russia Today, where we did a brief interview about gun control, which is cross-posted below.

We then headed off — with Debra — to Baltimore, where both Debra and I were David’s guests at an event promoting War Is A Lie, his compelling new book, and a manifesto for a war-free America. This was the first time I had met David, after years of correspondence between us, and it was great to spend time with him, and also to meet so many committed activists in the Baltimore area.

For the event in the evening, at the Barnes & Noble branch near John Hopkins University, a large and lively crowd enthusiastically welcomed the presentation of an award to Bill Hughes, an indefatigable activist who films everything that takes place in the Baltimore/Washington D.C. Area, and after a choir sang the old gospel song, “Down by the Riverside” (aka “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More”) — which struck all of us as something that should happen more often — David talked about his book, I discussed Guantánamo, and Debra spoke about the work of The World Can’t Wait, and I’m delighted that videos of my talk and of David’s presentation, are available below, via YouTube.

Andy Worthington in Baltimore.

David Swanson in Baltimore.

Andy Worthington, David Swanson and Danny Schechter on Russia Today.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Political prisoners? Surely that can’t be right, can it? Surely it’s only dictatorships in far-flung corners of the world who hold political prisoners, and not the United States of America?

Sadly, no. As the “War on Terror” prison established by President Bush begins its tenth year of operations, and as it begins to be forgotten that President Obama swept into office issuing an executive order promising to close the prison within a year, but failed spectacularly to do so, the bleak truth is that, for a majority of the 173 men held at Guantánamo, their chances of being released, or of receiving anything resembling justice, have receded to such an extent in the last two years that most face indefinite detention without charge or trial, and may still be in Guantánamo a year from now, two years from now, or even five, ten or twenty years from now.

The key to understanding how we reached this grim impasse two years into Barack Obama’s presidency is the review of all the prisoners’ cases that was conducted by the Guantánamo Review Task Force, a sober and careful collection of 60 career officials and lawyers from various government departments and the intelligence agencies, who reviewed all the cases throughout 2009, and issued recommendations a year ago regarding the “disposition” of the remaining prisoners.

Although the Task Force’s appraisal was infected with credulity regarding the quality of the Bush administration’s supposed evidence against the men (which is largely unreliable, as it was extracted under duress and torture), and the members were desperate not to make any mistakes by releasing men who might then prove to be dangerous, the Task Force nevertheless cleared 89 of the remaining 173 prisoners for release.

That’s an impressive figure, considering that it is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media that the government itself has conceded that it no longer wishes to hold over half of the remaining prisoners, but, a year after the Task Force issued its report, these men are still held, and it is this failure — and the explanations provided for it — that lead me to conclude that it is appropriate to describe them as political prisoners.

Of the 89 men, 58 are Yemenis, part of the largest national group at Guantánamo, consisting of 89 men in total. Just 23 Yemenis have been freed throughout Guantánamo’s long history, for a variety of reasons, but primarily because the Saudis, held in similar numbers but largely released in 2006 and 2007, had a government which is a closer ally of the US than Yemen, was prepared to argue more aggressively on their behalf, and was also able to create a state-of-the-art rehabilitation center to re-educate the men on their return, and to provide them with support and financial assistance to reintegrate into Saudi society.

Nevertheless, the Task Force approved 58 of the Yemenis for release (or, to use the careful language of lawyers, approved them for transfer). There was, however, a caveat. 28 were approved for immediate release, but 30 others were designated in a special category of their own, who “should not be transferred to Yemen in the near future,” and should be held in “conditional” detention — a novel category of detention — until “the security situation improves.”

While it could be argued that the “conditional” detention of these 30 men made them political prisoners a year ago, developments on Christmas Day 2009 ensured that the other 28 cleared Yemenis would also be held as political prisoners as well. The trigger for the administration’s refusal to honor the Task Force’s findings regarding these 28 men was the failed plane bomb plot of a young Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. When it was discovered that he had been recruited in Yemen, President Obama capitulated to a wave of unprincipled hysteria by announcing a moratorium on the release of any more Yemenis from Guantánamo, a moratorium which still stands a year later, which shows no sign of being abandoned, and which, by subjecting the men in question to collective punishment, or guilt by nationality, ensures that all 58 of the cleared Yemenis can legitimately be regarded as political prisoners.

The other 31 men cleared for release by the Task Force are still held because, for the most part, they cannot be repatriated as they would face torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries, which include China, Libya, Syria and Tunisia. To its credit, the Obama administration has found new homes in 15 countries for 36 prisoners in a similar situation, but as the pool of willing countries dwindles, it will become harder for the US government to refute allegations that they too are political prisoners, held only because the country responsible for unjustly detaining them in the first place — the United States — has refused to accept its own responsibility to offer them new homes, resisting calls to do so — by a District Court judge, and by White House Counsel Greg Craig — in the Justice Department, in the D.C. Circuit Court, in Congress, and in the Oval Office.

Of the other men, 33 were recommended for trials by the Task Force, but the administration has backed away from proposals to try them in federal court, because of opposition by Congress, or in the Military Commission trial system at Guantánamo, because of opposition from liberals and progressives.

I have no sympathy for the administration’s problems with the discredited Commissions, which should never have been revived after Bush left office, especially because the lowest point in their tawdry history was reached in October last year, when the former child soldier Omar Khadr accepted a plea deal in which he confessed to “war crimes” invented by Congress. These purported to criminalize his participation in a firefight with US soldiers in Afghanistan that led to his capture in July 2002, but the plea deal was met with such disdain around the world that the Obama administration is apparently unwilling to proceed with any further trials at Guantánamo.

Compounding this problem is the administration’s refusal to press ahead with the federal court trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, which was announced by Attorney General Eric Holder in November 2009. By failing to proceed with this plan, the administration allowed critics in Congress the opportunity to include a provision banning the transfer of any Guantánamo prisoner to the US mainland to face a trial in a military spending bill passed before Christmas, and when, this week, the President refused to veto the bill, or to issue a signing statement disagreeing with it, the 33 men proposed for trials have been consigned instead to indefinite detention without charge or trial, meaning that they too can realistically be regarded as political prisoners.

The last group of prisoners (leaving aside the three who are held because they lost their trial by Military Commission, or accepted a plea deal) are 48 men explicitly recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Task Force, on the basis that they are too dangerous to release, but that the information used to justify their detention would not stand up to scrutiny in a court of law.

I should hardly need to explain that this recommendation by the Task Force is fundamentally unacceptable, not only because it perpetuates the very system of arbitrary detention initiated by the Bush administration, which was deliberately designed to subvert domestic and international laws and treaties, but also because, if the government’s supposed evidence would not stand up in a court of law, then it is not evidence at all, but rather hearsay and unverifiable information contained in intelligence reports, which is fundamentally tainted by the torture and abuse to which prisoners were subjected.

The proposal also sidelines the District Court in Washington D.C., where the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions are ongoing, and where 57 cases have been decided to date, with 38 won by the prisoners. In many of these 38 cases, the judges have exposed exactly these kinds of problems with the government’s supposed evidence. In addition, in the majority of the 19 cases won by the government, the men who have lost their petitions, and who, in all probability, are amongst the 48 men designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial, are nothing more than foot soldiers for the Taliban in the military conflict with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, which morphed into a “War on Terror” after the US-led invasion in October 2001.

If anything, these men should be held as prisoners of war, not held up as some sort of terrorists, but on this problem, the executive, Congress and the judiciary are all silent, even though it reveals a fundamental problem with the entire detention system invented under George W. Bush and maintained under Obama.

The legislation that supposedly justifies the prisoners’ detention is the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

President Obama continues to rely on the AUMF, even though it fails to distinguish between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and even though it perpetuates the Bush administration’s ruinous notion that, instead of criminal suspects and prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, there is a third category of prisoner — what Bush called “enemy combatants,” and what Obama calls “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents,” as in the case of Omar Khadr — when this, clearly, should not be accepted at all. In Obama’s determination to continue with this dark folly, administration officials recently announced that the President is close to signing an executive order formalizing the indefinite detention of these 48 men, but providing them with some sort of regular review process to ascertain whether they can be released.

This sounds better than no review process at all, but the truth is that these 48 men are also political prisoners, held as a result of the administration’s refusal to accept that, if soldiers are to be detained, it should be as prisoners of war, and that, if men are suspected of terrorist activities, they should be tried rather than arbitrarily detained forever.

Until these problems are solved, and the Guantánamo prisoners are either tried or released, President Obama’s contribution to this bitter legacy of the Bush administration is to be presiding over the unthinkable: a prison where, however the prisoners have been designated, they are almost all held in indefinite detention, and are, indeed, political prisoners.

It is time for those who believe in justice to call for this miserable situation to be brought to an end.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Truthout.

I’m delighted to reproduce below a statement by my friend, the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, which was read out at a rally (at which I spoke) outside the White House on January 11, 2011, the 9th anniversary of the opening of the prison. Omar, whose testimony is at the heart of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” which I co-directed with Polly Nash, was held in US custody from May 2002 until December 2007, and spent most of that time at Guantánamo, after being held first in Pakistan and in Bagram, Afghanistan.

His comments provided a powerful conclusion to the rally, and a reminder not only of how justice still eludes the 173 men still held, but also of how the American people are prevented from hearing about the injustices of Guantánamo first hand, as Omar, and every other cleared prisoner, is prevented from visiting the US to meet people and to tell their stories, and the Obama administration, Congress and the D.C. Circuit Court have all made sure that no cleared prisoner will be allowed to live in the US, even if they face torture in their home countries, and no other country can be found that is prepared to offer them a new home.

A statement from Omar Deghayes, January 11, 2011

Two years ago, President Barack Obama pledged to bring an end to the anomaly that is Guantánamo within a year, and to thereby restore America’s moral standing in the world. Yet today, on January 11, 2011, we are marking the beginning of the tenth year since the first prisoners were transferred to Camp X Ray — and Guantánamo remains open, Obama’s promise in ruins.

This past December 19th just marked three years to the day that I tasted freedom again and was released from Guantánamo to the warm embrace of my family and the community who fought so hard for my freedom. But not a day has passed since in which my thoughts and prayers have not remained with the 173 men who continue to languish in Guantánamo, detained without trial, most of them not facing any charge, and entering their tenth year of being separated from their loved ones. 90 of these men have actually been cleared for release long ago.

One of these men who continues to be unjustly detained is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still detained at Guantánamo who has yet to come home to the UK. Today we remember Shaker’s wife and four children — all of whom are British nationals, the youngest of whom has never seen his father. Shaker’s children are being forced to endure yet another year of suffering, not knowing if or when their beloved father will return. Justice has been delayed yet another year for Shaker and the other 173 men detained in Cuba; and justice delayed is justice denied.

If this was not enough, President Obama’s intention to sign an executive order formalising the indefinite detention of the prisoners in Guantánamo now leaves us with the very real and disturbing prospect that, if we collectively fail to act and stand up, many of the men who continue to be held in Guantánamo will be left to rot there indefinitely. It is therefore vital that the American people continue in their efforts; and I cannot thank you enough for your tremendous courage and resilience in keeping up the fight for the prisoners in Guantánamo and ensuring that these men are not forgotten.

As we enter the tenth year of this lawlessness, I and the former prisoners who, with me, formed the Guantánamo Justice Centre in 2009, are united with one voice in calling upon President Obama to fulfill his promise and bring a swift end to the shameful stain on the United States that is Guantánamo. We call on the Obama administration to free the remaining prisoners from what Adnan Abdul Latif, one Yemeni prisoner, recently called a “piece of hell that kills everything, the spirit, the body and kicks away all the symptoms of health from them,” and to resettle those wrongly detained where they can rebuild their lives in safety and in peace.

In solidarity,
Omar Deghayes
Legal Director, Guantanamo Justice Centre, London, UK.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

On the morning of January 11, 2011, as part of my short U.S. tour to mark the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, I found myself in the surreal position of being outside The White House for the first time in my life, addressing a crowd of reporters, activists, lawyers, other members of the public and 173 hooded protestors in orange jumpsuits, as part of actions to mark the anniversary. A report in the Washington Post is available here.

In a short speech, I explained my disappointment at President Obama’s failure to close the prison as he promised, and briefly discussed the problems facing the 173 men still held, almost all of whom face indefinite detention without charge or trial — regardless of whether they have been designated as such, or cleared for release, or proposed for trials — unless the American people persuade the President and lawmakers that this combination of paralysis and obstruction is unacceptable and unforgiveable, and that steps must be taken urgently to ensure that the prison is closed as promised two years ago.

The following is a statement, posted on the website of the Center for Constitutional Rights, containing comments from representatives of the main organizations involved in the rally at The White House on January 11.

Rights Groups Mark Beginning of a Decade of Wrongful Detentions at Guantánamo and Demand Obama Close Island Prison with Justice

Rally in Front of White House to Close Guantánamo Bay Followed by Procession to DOJ

January 11, 2011, Washington, D.C. — As the prison at Guantánamo enters its 10th year, Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Witness Against Torture, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and other human rights groups called on President Obama to close the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay with justice at a rally in front of the White House. They closed the rally by reading a message from Omar Deghayes, a man who was arbitrarily detained at Guantánamo without charge for 6 years before being allowed to return to his home in England. After the rally, activists representing the 173 men still at Guantánamo marched in orange jumpsuits to the U.S. Department of Justice, where they held a vigil.

The groups are calling on President Obama to end indefinite arbitrary detention and unfair military commissions trials at Guantánamo Bay, and to either charge and fairly try or release the detained men. The rights groups demanded the president re-commit to rapidly closing Guantánamo, lift the blanket ban on all repatriations to Yemen, and continue to make diligent efforts to resettle the many men who cannot return to their home countries for fear of torture and persecution.

CCR, AI-USA, WAT and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) released a “Close Guantánamo with Justice” statement that is gathering support from prominent human rights organizations, activists, scholars, artists, writers, and torture survivors from all around the world — including the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, Australia, and Africa. The statement includes a plea to the international community to offer homes to the men at Guantánamo who have been cleared for release or won their habeas cases, but cannot leave until third countries make humanitarian gestures to offer them resettlement. The statement and list of signatories is available on the CCR website here.

Pardiss Kebriaei, Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney representing men detained at Guantánamo, said, “Approximately 30 men could be released from Guantánamo tomorrow but for a fear of torture or persecution in their home countries. These men appeal to the international community for help in offering them safe havens and a chance to rebuild their lives. People of conscience in the world cannot let yet another anniversary of Guantánamo pass without doing something to help close it. Offering resettlement is a key part of the solution.”

Valerie Lucznikowska, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, said, “Our politicians must stop exploiting our grief and our concern for our safety for political ends. The rule of law, the essence of a democratic society, demands Constitutional federal trials of those who continue to be detained in Guantánamo. We cannot continue to deny human beings their freedom without legal charges and fair trials. Those who have been cleared must not continue to be held simply because of their nationality or the U.S. government’s indecisiveness. Guantánamo has made us less safe. Close it.”

Tom Parker, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy and policy director of terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights, said, “For nine years Guantánamo has been a global symbol for injustice and abuse. The idea that you can’t hold people indefinitely without trial has been around since the Middle Ages. It is a basic human right. President Obama continues to promise change, but what this administration has actually delivered is continuity for one of the darkest chapters in America’s recent history.”

Matthew W. Daloisio, organizer with Witness Against Torture, said, “The Obama administration’s failure to close Guantánamo and undo Bush-era policies is a disaster for the rule of law, the best American ideals, and the security of people everywhere who want to live in peace. This is not about the politics of Left and Right; it’s about what’s right and wrong. Guantánamo, abusive treatment, and indefinite detention are wrong, and must once again be decisively rejected.”

Andy Worthington, British author and Guantánamo expert, said, “One year after President Obama promised to have closed Guantánamo 173 men are still there, the majority of whom should never have been held in the first place. Without concerted action from the American people it’s very possible the majority will never be released.”

Viviana Krsticevic, Executive Director of the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), said, “Indefinite detention at Guantánamo will not end unless the international community offers safe homes for the men who cannot return to their countries of nationality for fear of torture or persecution. As co-counsel with the Center for Constitutional Rights before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, representing Djamel Ameziane — an Algerian man now entering his tenth year of arbitrary detention at Guantánamo, who will remain indefinitely imprisoned until a third country offers him resettlement — we call on President Obama to initiate dialogue with the Organization of American States so that countries in the Americas wishing to be involved in the resettlement process as a humanitarian gesture may do so.”

For more information, please visit the websites of Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Witness Against Torture, the Center for Justice and International Law, and Andy Worthington.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

On the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, it may sound uncharitable to President Obama to be asking whether all plans to close the prison have failed, and to be asking whether it might remain in operation for as long as anyone can foresee. After all, the President may have failed to close it within a year of taking office, despite promising to do so in an executive order on his second day in the White House, but he and his spokespeople continue to assert that it remains their intention to close it.

In reality, however, it is reasonable to propose that Guantánamo is now a permanent institution for a variety of reasons. The first concerns a number of cynical moves by lawmakers in recent months, inserting provisions into a military spending bill that are explicitly designed to keep Guantánamo open — a ban on using funds to transfer Guantánamo prisoners to the U.S. mainland to face trials, a ban on using funds to buy or build a prison on the U.S. mainland to hold Guantánamo prisoners, and a ban on the release of any prisoner cleared for release by the President’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force (composed of representatives of government departments and the intelligence agencies) to countries considered dangerous by lawmakers — including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

On all of these challenges to his stated intentions — bringing at least some of the 33 men recommended for trials by the Task Force to the mainland to face federal court trials, holding them in a U.S. prison, and releasing some of the 89 prisoners “approved for transfer” by the Task Force — President Obama could have decided to override Congress. As was reported before Christmas, it was within the bounds of his authority to veto the legislation or to issue a signing statement striking down those parts of the spending bill that he considered to be an unconstitutional infringement of Presidential authority.

In the end, however, demonstrating what many observers now regard as typical cowardice, he chose not to do so. A veto was always out of the question, because it threatened Congressional authorization of billions of dollars to continue the ruinously expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that no one in authority has any wish to end, but a signing statement, declaring the provisions as an unconstitutional infringement of executive power, was a distinct possibly, despite the negative connotations of signing statements after George W. Bush’s excessive use of them during his Presidency. As David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, lawyers who served in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, explained in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “Congressional efforts to block future trials by imposing spending restrictions on the president are unconstitutional and should be abandoned.”

Nevertheless, despite such trenchant criticism of Congress from Conservative commentators, Obama refused to go as far as Rivkin and Casey, choosing instead to restrict his opposition to some fine sounding, but ultimately toothless grumbling. As the New York Times reported, “He sharply criticized those restrictions, but did not claim that he had the constitutional authority to disregard them,” and, instead, merely said he “would ask Congress to repeal the restrictions, seek to ‘mitigate their effects’ and oppose any attempt to extend or expand them after they expired in September, at the end of the current fiscal year.”

Criticizing the ban on bringing prisoners to the mainland to face trials, Obama defended the prosecution of terrorist suspects in federal court as “a powerful tool in our efforts to protect the nation,” and described the ban imposed by Congress as “a dangerous and unprecedented challenge to critical executive branch authority to determine when and where to prosecute Guantánamo detainees, based on the facts and the circumstances of each case and our national security interests.” As a result of his refusal to overturn the provision, however, the 33 men recommended for trials by the Task Force will, for the most part, remain held without trial.

The administration is reportedly unwilling to proceed with trials by Military Commission, rightfully criticized as a second-tier judicial system by opponents, especially after the unjust and undignified plea deal arranged with former child prisoner Omar Khadr in October, and the main effect of Obama’s capitulation, therefore, is to hand victory to the lawmakers who inserted this provision specifically to prevent the President from proceeding with the federal court trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks This trial was announced by Attorney General Eric Holder last November, but it met with fierce resistance from misguided Republican ideologues who are still sold on the Bush administration’s ruinous and misguided notion that terrorist suspects are warriors and not criminals.

Criticizing the ban on using military funds to release any of the 89 prisoners cleared by the Task Force unless, as the Times described it, defense secretary Robert Gates “certifies that the country has met a strict set of security conditions,” the President stated this process of certification, adding to security concerns already undertaken by the government, would “hinder the conduct of delicate negotiations with foreign countries” and “interfere with the authority of the executive branch to make important and consequential foreign policy and national security determinations regarding whether and under what circumstances such transfers should occur in the context of an ongoing armed conflict.”

On this point, the effect will be less noticeable, as 58 of the 89 men cleared for release by the Task Force have already been held indefinitely without charge or trial for a year because they are Yemenis, and last January, following hysterical overreaction to the news that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had apparently been recruited in Yemen, the President announced a moratorium on releasing any Yemeni prisoners that is still in place, and shows no sign of being lifted. Of the other 31 men, the majority are awaiting third countries prepared to accept them, as they cannot be safely repatriated, because they face the risk of torture, and  the administration, Congress, and the D.C. Circuit Court have all acted to make sure that none of them can be released in the U.S. It is, therefore, unlikely that the Congressional ban will apply to any of these men.

The only prisoners not covered by this ban are those cleared for release after winning their habeas petitions in the District Court in Washington D.C. On this point, however, the President has done nothing but infuriate liberal supporters, when, on Monday, he repatriated an Algerian, Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, against his will. Bin Mohammed had won his habeas petition in November 2009, but was terrified of returning to his home country, where, primarily, he feared being attacked by Islamist militants. On his behalf, the judge in his case, Judge Gladys Kessler, had strived to prevent his forcible repatriation, but had finally been overruled by the Supreme Court, paving the way for his return to Algeria on Monday.

The fact that the only man to be released since last August — and, very possibly, the only man to be released for the foreseeable future — was someone who was desperate not to be returned to his home country is a sad indictment of the position that President Obama has taken on the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, two years after he promised to close the prison, and one year after he failed to do so.

As I have explained above, by refusing to tackle Congress over its unconstitutional intrusions on his authority — and through his moratorium on releasing any Yemenis — he has ensured that there is no practical distinction between the 33 men proposed for trials by the Task Force, and the 89 men cleared for release, because almost all of them have now been consigned to indefinite detention without charge or trial for the foreseeable future.

Completing this picture are 48 other men, explicitly designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial by the Task Force. This has been an unacceptable proposal, ever since it was first signaled by the President in May 2009, as the men in question are regarded as being too dangerous to release, even though the administration concedes that it has no usable evidence to prove these assertions. This, of course, indicates that giving credence to unreliable information derived through torture played a key role in these determinations. The plans are also troubling because they so explicitly perpetuate the position taken by President Bush when he established Guantánamo, and because they give succor to those who want to see indefinite detention without charge or trial used again in future, and on this front it was thoroughly depressing to hear, before Christmas, that Obama was considering issuing an executive order formally approving the indefinite detention of these 48 men, but guaranteeing that they would receive some sort of regular review of their cases.

A decision on this is expected soon, and it should be fiercely resisted by anyone who believes that the malignant experiment at Guantánamo has gone on for far too long, and that holding prisoners is only acceptable when they are either criminal suspects to be put forward for trials, or prisoners of war who can, in any case, be held until the end of hostilities. And if President Obama does go ahead and sign this executive order, it is incumbent on everyone opposed to the ongoing scandal of Guantánamo to point out that, with Congressional interference and Obama’s moratorium, it is not just 48 prisoners who are proposed for indefinite detention without charge or trial, but almost every prisoner still held at Guantánamo — 170 men in total.

High hopes that Guantánamo would be closed by Obama may have been dashed within months of him taking office, but even the most cynical observer would have been hard pressed to say at the time that, after two years, Obama would be presiding over a situation that was so similar to that created by Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 — where the entire population of the prison is, in effect, arbitrarily detained, held indefinitely without charge or trial, regardless of whether or not the majority of them are supposed to have been freed or put on trial.

As the prison begins its 10th year of operations, this is a deeply depressing state of affairs, and one that anyone concerned with justice for the remaining prisoners should campaign about, complain about, and publicize relentlessly.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

With the start of the tenth year of operations at Guantánamo on Tuesday January 11, and no end in sight for the bleak prison opened at the height of the hubris of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” I’m delighted — while here in the US campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo — to be a signatory to a cry for justice for the remaining 173 prisoners, initiated by the Center for Constitutional Rights and other groups in the US, and signed by prominent human rights organizations, activists, scholars, artists, writers, and torture survivors from around the world.

This campaigning document, “Close Guantánamo with Justice Now,” urges President Obama to overcome the cowardice that has overtaken him in the last 20 months, since his inspiring words on the campaign trail and in his first few days in office in January 2009, when he promised to close Guantánamo within a year, asking him to make a new commitment to close the prison, to try or release the men held there, to abandon his plans to hold 48 men indefinitely without charge or trial, to lift his ban on releasing cleared prisoners to Yemen, to allow cleared prisoners to settle in the US, to investigate three deeply suspicious deaths at Guantánamo in June 2006, to ensure accountability for crimes committed by senior officials and lawyers in the Bush administration, to ensure the welfare of men released from Guantánamo, and to prevent the forcible repatriation of men to countries where they face the risk of torture.

Close Guantánamo with Justice Now

At the start of his administration, President Obama signed an executive order mandating the closure of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba within a year. Yet the prison remains open, and on January 11, 2011 it enters its tenth year of operation. Failing to fulfill the executive order, the Obama administration has also extended some of the worst aspects of the Guantánamo system by continuing indefinite detentions without charge or trial, employing illegitimate military commissions to try some suspects, and blocking accountability for torture both by refusing to conduct independent and thorough investigations and by attempting to prevent the courts from reviewing lawsuits brought by formerly detained men.

As human rights organizations and people of conscience, we are calling for the closure of Guantánamo and both transparency at all U.S.-run detention sites and accountability for the abuses that happen within them. We oppose secret detention sites, including so-called “filtration” or “screening” sites like the covert “black prison” at Bagram, where even the International Committee of the Red Cross has been denied access and where abusive interrogations are allegedly taking place. We also express our opposition to excessively punitive conditions of confinement in prisons and detention centers inside the United States, and note that prolonged solitary confinement is a form of torture prohibited under international standards for human rights. We reject the continuation of illegal and abusive Bush-era detention and interrogation policies by the Obama administration.

The story of Guantánamo remains the shameful case of the U.S. government rounding up nearly 800 men and boys, indiscriminately labeling them “the worst of the worst,” and throwing them into an island prison designed to exist beyond the reaches of the law, where they would have no right to challenge their detention or abuse. The vast majority of the prisoners at Guantánamo should never have been detained in the first place. Many were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and were fleeing the chaos of war when U.S. forces entered Afghanistan. Only one in twenty was captured by the U.S. military. Most were captured by local civilians and authorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan and sold to the United States in exchange for substantial bounty. According to Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a senior State Department official who served in the Bush administration between 2002-2005, the Bush administration knew early on that the majority of the men at Guantánamo were innocent but did not release them due to political concerns that doing so could harm support for the government’s push for war in Iraq and the broader “Global War on Terror.”

It is now clear that the Obama administration has no plans to close Guantánamo anytime soon, while opposition from Congress makes that goal even more remote. The prison at Guantánamo continues to exist in violation of both ethical and legal standards, and at risk to our collective safety. President Obama must act decisively or risk making Guantánamo and the Bush detention regime permanent features of the U.S. landscape. We call on President Obama and relevant departments within his administration to:

• Recommit to rapidly closing Guantánamo, and make clear that many of the men there were detained in error. It is by now well established, including by former administration officials, that the majority of the prisoners at Guantánamo should never have been detained. If President Obama were to exercise leadership and acknowledge this, it would help create the political atmosphere necessary to close the prison.

• Charge or release the men detained at Guantánamo. In 2004 and 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners at Guantánamo may challenge their detention in U.S. federal court by means of habeas petitions. Since then, federal judges have ruled in the great majority of cases that the government lacked evidence sufficient to justify the continued detention of the petitioners. Other men at Guantánamo have been cleared for release by the U.S. government’s own Guantánamo Review Task Force, which consists of representatives from every government agency with a stake in the matter, including the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, and the CIA. All men ultimately cleared for release by the courts or the government should be immediately repatriated or resettled, and all others should be formally charged and tried in a fair and open proceeding.

• Abandon any plan for indefinite detention. The Obama administration has declared it will hold approximately 50 of the men at Guantánamo indefinitely without charge or trial, and plans to formalize indefinite detention through an executive order. The official justification is that these men are “too dangerous” to release but “not feasible” to prosecute, purportedly because there is not sufficient evidence against them that meets the minimum standards of any court; because their trials could compromise intelligence-gathering; or because detainees could challenge evidence obtained through coercion. But federal courts are fully capable of dealing with sensitive evidence, and if the government only has tainted evidence against a detainee, then the only evidence it has is both illegal and unreliable, and does not justify continued detention. The administration’s plan for indefinite detention constitutes a system of pre-emptive incarceration based on the alleged probability of future crime, and not on verifiable past conduct. This plan is flatly inconsistent with the rule of law and should be rejected.

• Lift the blanket ban on all repatriations to Yemen. The Obama administration must end its indefinite suspension of all repatriations of Yemeni men at Guantánamo and allow those who have won their habeas cases or been cleared for release by the U.S. government’s own extensive Guantánamo Review Task Force to go home. The Yemeni men, like all detainees, must be individually evaluated on the basis of what they have done, not punished based on their nationality or the alleged actions of others.

• Cease forcible repatriations of men whose safety is threatened by transfer. There are men at Guantánamo who have expressed a strong fear of returning to their countries of origin and who should not be repatriated where there is reason to believe they may be at risk on their return. No detainee should be transferred to a state where credible risks exist to his safety.

• Lift the ban on resettling men into the United States. More than 15 countries, including France, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Hungary, Belgium, Switzerland, Albania, Latvia and Palau, have accepted detainees for resettlement without incident. The U.S. government should also offer a home to men who have won their habeas cases or been cleared for transfer and have no other safe country to go to. (A federal judge did order the release of clearly innocent Uighur Muslim detainees into the United States, but both the Bush and Obama administrations appealed the case and then Congress acted to bar any resettlement of wrongly detained men to the United States.) Offering to resettle such men would also encourage other countries to make similar offers and help shut Guantánamo.

• Fully investigate the deaths of men who died in detention, including the three who died in 2006. Three detained men who were never charged with any crime died at Guantánamo in June 2006. Initially reported as suicides, new evidence from four soldiers stationed at the base has raised serious questions about the circumstances surrounding their deaths. Until now, the Obama administration has not only failed to conduct an independent and thorough investigation of the deaths but has opposed inquiry and review by the courts.

• Ensure accountability for crimes. Despite its promise of a new era of accountability and respect for the rule of law, the Obama administration has repeatedly acted to ensure impunity for those under the Bush administration who planned, authorized, and committed torture. The Obama administration must honor its promise by conducting a comprehensive inquiry into well-documented and grave human rights abuses at Guantánamo and elsewhere, including torture. Specifically, the Attorney General should appoint an independent prosecutor with a full mandate to investigate and prosecute those responsible for torture and other war crimes, as far up the chain of command as the facts may lead. Moreover, President Obama should condemn newly revealed pressure by his own administration to secretly obstruct efforts within the Spanish judiciary to investigate egregious violations of international law, including the torture of former Guantánamo detainees and other individuals who have been subjected to the U.S. torture program, and fully cooperate with the proceedings in Spain.

• Take responsibility for the well being of the men after they are released. The U.S. government must not hold men without charge in inhumane conditions for years, subject them to abuse including torture, and then repatriate and resettle them in far corners of the world, leaving their rehabilitation and reintegration to other governments, organizations, and individuals. The government has a responsibility to ensure that the men have adequate support and resources after release.

We also urge the international community to offer safety to men at Guantánamo who cannot leave until third countries come forward to offer them resettlement, and to ensure their rights and well-being once resettled. Many of the men resettled have not been granted permission to work, to travel, or to reunite with their families after years of separation and anguish, and the legal status of many remains in limbo.

We invite people of conscience all over the world to work with us to make sure Guantánamo is closed with justice, and recommit to advocating towards this end.

Organizational Signatures:

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR)
Amnesty International U.S.A. (AI-USA)
Witness Against Torture (WAT)
International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH)
Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL)
Cageprisoners
Physicians for Human Rights
Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASCC)
The Program for Torture Victims
Metro NY Religious Campaign Against Torture
Progressive Democrats of America
Project SALAM
Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
Center for Justice and Accountability
South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI)
Action for a Progressive Pakistan
Pakistan Solidarity Network
Appeal for Justice
Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC)
Defending Dissent Foundation
No More Guantánamos
War Resisters League
Guantanamo Justice Center
Friends of Human Rights
Global Exchange
Alliance for Justice
Human Rights Defense Center
CODEPINK for Peace
WESPAC Foundation
International Justice Network
United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ)
National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF)
World Can’t Wait
Disbar Torture Lawyers
Warisacrime.org
Casa Esperanza
New Security Action
NC Immigrant Rights Project
Peace and Justice Task Force at All Souls Unitarian Church Society of Jesus – New York Province
Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma Country (CA)
WBAI Local Station Board
Voices for Creative Nonviolence
Progressive Peace Coalition of Columbus, Ohio
Peace Action of Montgomery County, MD
Connie Hogarth Center for Social Action
The Make Agency
Justice Through Music
Historians Against the War
La Ligue Algerienne pour la Defense des Droits de l’Homme (LADDH)
The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights
BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR)
Palestinian Human Rights Organization (PHRO)
Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (HRFT-Turkey)
Human Rights Association (IHD-Turkey)
Committees for the Defence of Democracy Freedoms and Human Rights in Syria (CDF)
Kurdish Organization for the Defence of Human Rights and the General Liberties in Syria (DAD)
The Human Rights Organization in Syria (MAF)
The Arab Organization for Human Rights in Syria (AOHRS)
National Organization for Human Rights in Syria (NOHR-S)
The Kurdish Committee for Human Rights in Syria – the rased (KRDCHR)
Women Journalists Without Chains (WJWC-Yemen)
Civil Liberties Organization (CLO-Nigeria)
Human Rights Information & Training Center (HRITC-Yemen)
Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS-Egypt)
Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies (DCHRS-Syria)
Committees for the Defense of Democracy, Freedom, and Human Rights in Syria (CDY-Syria)
The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights
Comite de Accion Juridica (CAJ-Argentina)
Liga Argentina por los Derechos del Hombre
Observatorio Ciudadano (OC-Chile)
La Fundación Regional de Asesoría en Derechos Humanos (INREDH-Ecuador)
Asamblea Permanente de Derechos Humanos-Bolivia (APDHB-Bolivia)
Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de España (APDHE-Spain)
Comisión Cubana de Derechos Humanos y Reconciliación Nacional (CCDHRN-Cuba)
La Liga Mexicana por la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos A.C. (Limeddh-Mexico)
La Fundación Diego Lucero A.C.
La Asociación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos y Víctimas de Violaciones de Derechos Humanos en México
El Observatorio Nacional de Prisiones México (ONP México)
La Red Universitaria de Monitores de Derechos Humanos (RUMODH)
El Centro de Derechos Humanos Coordinadora 28 de Mayo A.C.
La Asociación de Derechos Humanos del Estado de México (ADHEM-Mexico)
La Comisión Ecuménica de Derechos Humanos (CEDHU-Ecuador) Programa Venezolano de Educación Acción en Derechos Humanos (PROVEA-Venezuela)
Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos (APRODEH-Perú
Oficina Jurídica para la Mujer de Cochabamba (Bolivia)
Instituto de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas” (IDHUCA- El Salvador)
Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones (OVP-Venezuela)
Comisión Ecuménica de Derechos Humanos (CEDHU- Ecuador)
Centro de Documentación en Derechos Humanos “Segundo Montes Mozo S.J.” (CSMM- Ecuador)
Plataforma Interamericana de Derechos Humanos Democracia y Desarrollo
Malta Association of Human Rights
International Muslim Women’s League-Europe
Scotland Against Criminalising Communities
Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre Inc. (FKCLC-Australia)
Unione Forense per la Tutela dei Diritti Umani (UFTDU – Italy)
Reforest the Earth, UK
Finnish League for Human Rights (FLHR)
Brighton Against Guantanamo (UK)
Worthing Against War (UK)
Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants (CURE)
Lewes Amnesty International Group (UK)
Galway Alliance Against War (Ireland)
Hellenic League for Human Rights
Save Shaker Aamer Campaign – Last UK Resident in Guantanamo (SSAC)

Individual Signatures:

Ann Wright (Ret. U.S. Army Colonel and State Department Official)
Ray McGovern (Former US Army Intelligence Officer; CIA analyst)
Ray Abourezk (Former US Senator, South Dakota)
Chris Hedges (Journalist and Author, Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Kristiina Kouros (Secretary General, Human Rights League)
Ariel Dorfman (Chilean author, Duke University)
Danial Saoud (President, Committees for the Defence of Freedoms and Human Rights in Syria)
Mustafa Osso (President, Kurdish Organization for the Defence of Human Rights and the General Liberties in Syria)
Mahmoud Merai (President, The Arab Organization for Human Rights in Syria)
Ammar Qurabi (President, National Organization for Human Rights in Syria)
Radeef Mustafa (The Kurdish Committee for Human Rights in Syria) Omar Deghayes (formerly detained at Guantanamo)
Moazzam Begg (Director, Cageprisoners, formerly detained at Guantanamo)
Andy Worthington (Journalist, Author, Filmmaker)
Karen Greenberg
Judith Butler (Author, Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, Co-Director of the Program in Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley)
Almerindo E. Ojeda (The Guantanamo Testimonials Project)
Raji Sourani (Director, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights)
Leili Kashani (the Center for Constitutional Rights)
Frida Berrigan (Witness Against Torture)
Ozturk Turkdogan (General President, Human Rights Association-Turkey)
Yavuz Onen (Former President of Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, human rights activist)
Yusuf Alatas (Vice President, FIDH)
Fr. Bob Bossie (SCJ, 8th Day Center For Justice)
Michael P. Seng (Professor, The John Marshall Law School)
Medea Benjamin (CODEPINK Women for Peace)
Leonard Goodman (Attorney)
Michael Berube (Pennsylvania State University, Director – Institute for the Arts and Humanities)
Alice Kessler-Harris (Columbia University, Dept. of History)
Tom Hayden (Peace and Justice Resource Center)
Ellen Schrecker (Yeshiva University, Dept. of History)
Gregory Friedd (Suffolk University, Department of Philosophy)
Noam Chomsky (Author, Former Institute Professor, MIT)
Nancy Fraser (The New School, Dept. of Political Science)
Todd Gitlin (Columbia University, Professor of Journalism and Sociology)
Anna Marie Smith (Cornell University, Dept. of Government)
Richard Flacks (University of California at Santa Barbara, Dept. of Sociology)
Eli Zaretsky (The New School, Dept. of History)
John D’Emilio (The University of Illinois at Chicago, Gender & Women’s Studies and History)
Maurice Isserman (Hamilton College, Professor of History)
Jodi Dean (Hobart and William Smith College, Dept. of Political Science)
William Blum (Author)
Andrew Arato (The New School, Dept. of Politics)
Richard Bernstein (The New School, Dept. of Philosophy)
Lawrence Wittner (The State University of New York at Albany, Dept. of History)
David Newbury (Smith College, Dept. of History)
Van Gosse (Franklin and Marshall College, Dept. of History)
Jinee Lakoneeta (Drew University, Dept. of Political Science)
Nicola Foote (Florida Gulf Coast University, Latin American and Caribbean History)
Timothy Patrick McCarthy (Harvard University, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy)
Jay Bernstein (The New School, Dept. of Philosophy)
Paul Apostolidis (Whitman College, Dept. of Political Science)
Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (Provost and Dean of the Faculty, Whitman College)
Stephen Duncombe (The Gallatin School, New York University, Media Studies)
Neil Gordon (Author, The New School, Dept. of English)
Jeremy Varon (The New School, Dept. of History)
Michael S. Foley (Sheffield University, UK, Dept. of History)
Alyson Cole (Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, Political Science Department and Women’s Studies Program)
Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz (California State University, Professor Emerita) Oz Frankel (The New School, Department of History)
Ian Lekus (Harvard University)
Cyrus Bina (University of Minnesota, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics)
Ben Sheperd (City University of New York, Department of Sociology) William Ayers (University of Illinois at Chicago, Distinguished Professor of Education)
Dan Berger (Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Pennsylvania)
Amy Kaplan ( University of Pennsylvania, Department of English) Victoria Langland (University of California at Davis, Department of History)
Lauren Goodlad (Director, Unit for Criticism, The University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana)
John Morefield (Educational Consultant)
Romand Coles (Northern Arizona University, Program for Community, Culture and Environment)
Robert Shaffer (Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, Department of History)
Mark Hatlie (University of Maryland University College, Department of History)
Robby Cohen (New York University, Department of Teaching and Learning)
David Lelyveld (William Patterson University, Department of History) Michael J. Sullivan III (Drexel University, Professor of History and Politics)
Michael Hanagan (Vassar University, Department of History)
A. Tom Grunfeld ( Empire State College, Distinguished Teaching Professor)
John M. Shaw (Portland Community College, History Instructor)
Nicolas J S Davies (Author)
Scott Laderman (University of Minnesota, Duluth, Department of History)
Avery Gordon (University of California at Santa Barbara)
Dick Bennet (University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Professor Emeritus of English)
Keith Carson (Atlantic Cape Community College, Department of History)
E. Wayne Ross (University of British Columbia, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy)
Michael C. Batinski (Department of History, Emeritus)
Marc Becker (Truman State University, Professor of History)
Marian Mollin (Associate Professor of History, Virginia Tech)
Takao Takahara (Meiji Gakuin University, Japan, International Politics and Peace Research)
Bruce Cohen (Worcester State University, Department of History) Judith Abbott (Sonoma State University, Department of History)
Stan Nadel (University of Portland)
Harriet Alonso (City College of New York, Department of History)
Ralph Summy (University of Sydney, Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies)
Kevin P. Clements (University of Otago, New Zealend, National Centre for Peace & Conflict Studies)
Brad Simpson (Princeton University, History and International Affairs) Astra Taylor (Independent Filmmaker)
Sam Green ( Independent Filmmaker)
Jeff Mangum (Musician;, Neutral Milk Hotel)
Andrew Boyd (The Other 98% and Agit-Pop Communications)
Hilton Obenzinger (Author)
Doug Rossinow (Metropolitan State University)
Paul C. Mishler (Associate Professor of Labor Studies, IU Program in Labor Studies- IUSB)
Richard Fedder (Civil Rights Attorney)
Toby Lieberman (Affordable Housing Loan Program Director, Opportunity Fund, San Jose, CA)
Elsie Monge (CEDHU-Ecuador)
Cesar Duque (CEDHU-Ecuador)
Carolina Pazmiño (CEDHU- Ecuador)
Milton Vargas (CEDHU-Ecuador)
Consuelo Cano (CEDHU-Ecuador)
Alicia Granda (CEDHU-Ecuador)
Luisana Aguilar (CEDHU-Ecuador)
Susana Díaz (CEDHU-Ecuador)
Mario Chuquimarca (CEDHU-Ecuador)
Luis Acebal-Monfort (Board Member, Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de España-Human Rights Association of Spain)

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This morning, as part of my current US tour to raise awareness of Guantánamo, in the week that the 173 men still held in the “War on Terror” prison begin their tenth year of detention, I was delighted to be invited to speak to Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez on Democracy Now! Amy and Juan had also invited Katie Gallagher of the Center of Constitutional Rights, and our segment of the show, which lasts about 12 minutes, is available below:

In the time available, I was pleased to have the opportunity to explain, briefly, how, as the 9th anniversary approaches, we face the shocking possibility that very few prisoners at all will be released before the 2012 elections. With reference to the findings of the Obama administration’s own Guantánamo Review Task Force, I explained how the 89 men cleared for release are, for the most part, going nowhere, because 58 are Yemenis, whose repatriation has been prevented by both President Obama and by Congress, and 31 others are awaiting third countries prepared to offer them a new home. As I explained with regard to the Yemenis, “It’s been a year now since the President announced a moratorium on releasing any prisoner from Guantánamo to Yemen because of the uproar that came about because, at Christmas 2009, a Nigerian man tried to blow up a plane, and it came out that he was apparently recruited in Yemen. So Yemen is now this entire terrorist country. Nobody cleared for release from Guantánamo can be released there because of these fears that they will join some terrorist cell. That’s guilt by nationality. It’s collective punishment. However you want to look at it, it’s grossly unfair.”

Speaking of the other 31 men and the need to secure third countries prepared to offer them homes, I pointed out how, in the recent WikiLeaks revelations about the international horse-trading regarding these men, the failure of the US to take responsibility for any of these men had been overlooked. As I told Amy and Juan, “It remains a problem that, at every level, at the highest levels of government in the United States, everybody who could — the courts, Congress, President Obama — refused to accept cleared prisoners to be brought to live on the US mainland.”

Moreover, just this week, President Obama showed his disdain for those seeking justice for the Guantánamo prisoners by forcibly repatriating the first prisoner released since last August — Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian who had won his habeas corpus petition, but was desperate not to return home, and who, shockingly, was repatriated while a legal challenge to his forcible repatriation was underway.

I also spoke about the 48 men proposed for ongoing indefinite detention without charge or trial, noting how this designation — and the recent suggestion that President Obama will sign an executive order formalizing their indefinite detention, while providing for some sort of review process — is also fundamentally wrong. I also mentioned how the Task Force’s findings — through a secretive process initiated by the Executive — conflicts with the prisoners’ ongoing habeas corpus petitions, or involves designating for indefinite detention men who have lost their habeas petitions, even though the majority of the 19 men who have lost their petitions “were very peripheral foot soldiers in the military conflict that took place before the 9/11 attacks, in Afghanistan,” and are, explicitly, “not terrorists.”

Katie spoke about two submissions, filed in Spain today, relating to ongoing investigations of the US torture program, which are pending in the National Court of Spain. In the first, CCR and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) “submitted a dossier regarding former commander of Guantánamo, Geoffrey Miller, which collects and analyzes the evidence demonstrating his role in the torture of detainees at Guantánamo and in Iraq,” requesting that a subpoena be issued for Miller to testify before the court, and in the second, CCR and ECCHR “submitted an expert opinion that sets out the legal basis for holding the ‘Bush Six’ criminally liable under international criminal law,” which summarizes the key evidence against the defendants — David Addington, William J. Haynes II, Douglas Feith, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee. Further information about both cases — including the submissions — is available here, and also see this op-ed in the Guardian by CCR’s President, Michael Ratner.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Below is an article I wrote for the Guardian’s Comment is free America, after editor Matt Seaton got in touch to ask if I’d be interested in writing a short article promoting the screening of my film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash) at Revolution Books in New York this evening, as part of my short US tour to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining 173 prisoners during the week that the prison begins its tenth year of operations (on January 11). I was, of course, delighted to accept Matt’s offer, and hope some to see some of you at Revolution Books this evening, where I will be joined by Scott Horton, law professor and columnist at Harper’s Magazine. I’d also like to encourage anyone in the D.C area to come to The White House for the rally and protest on the morning of January 11.

Ending Bush’s big lie on Guantánamo
Andy Worthington, The Guardian, January 6, 2011

In the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” it was important to dehumanise the men held at Guantánamo, to give life to the myth that the prison held “the worst of the worst” terrorists, picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

This was not true, as reports over the years have demonstrated. A former military interrogator in Afghanistan, writing under the pseudonym Chris Mackey, explained in his book The Interrogators that there was no screening process in place, and that every Arab who came into US custody, by whatever method, had to be transferred to Guantánamo.

Moreover, in 2006, an analysis of the Pentagon’s own allegations against 517 prisoners (compiled after 200 men and boys had already been released), and conducted by researchers at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, found that 86 percent were captured by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani forces, 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the US or its allies, and only 8 percent were alleged to have had any kind of affiliation with al-Qaeda.

In addition, around half the prisoners were not captured in Afghanistan, but were either seized in Pakistan, or crossing the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and although many of the men were foot soldiers for the Taliban, who had been involved in the long-standing civil war against the Northern Alliance, which had begun many years before the 9/11 attacks, others were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers, or economic migrants, and only 33 of the remaining 174 prisoners have been recommended for trial by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed all the cases in 2009.

As the prison at Guantánamo prepares to start its tenth year of operations (on January 11), and as I begin a week of events in New York and Washington D.C. to raise awareness of the remaining prisoners, these men are still, for the most part, as dehumanised as they were under President Bush.

Part of the attempt to raise awareness involves showing the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash, and which features compelling and emotional testimony from former Guantánamo prisoners Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg, both seized in 2002 from the homes where they were living in Pakistan, many hundreds of miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan, and sent to Guantánamo.

Last year, I travelled around the UK with Omar Deghayes, showing the film to audiences of students and activists who were grateful for the opportunity to meet Omar, after listening to his harrowing descriptions of how he was mistreated, and how the British security services colluded in his abuse, but when I travel to the US, I am not allowed to visit with Omar, or with Moazzam, or with any other cleared prisoner.

Audiences in the States are also moved by Omar’s testimony, when they have the opportunity to see it, but it would have a much greater impact if they were able to meet a former prisoner in person.

Sadly, the Obama administration is largely to blame for this state of affairs. In early 2009, White House Counsel Greg Craig was close to finalising a plan to rehouse a handful of cleared prisoners who could not be repatriated safely. These men were the Uighurs, Muslims for China’s Xinjiang province, seized by mistake, who had won their habeas corpus petition in a US court in October 2008, and their presence in the US would have done more to destroy the Bush administration’s enduring lies than any other gesture.

However, when Republicans got wind of it, and reacted with unjustifiable outrage, Obama quashed the plan, making it difficult for the US to find third countries prepared to take cleared prisoners who could not be repatriated, and contributing to the paralysis that Obama finds himself in today: presiding over a prison in which, although over half the remaining prisoners have been cleared for release by Obama’s Task Force, cynical lawmakers, and the President’s own cowardice, have made it increasingly difficult for him to release anyone.

Anonymity — the dehumanisation of these men — helps to maintain the illusion that their ongoing detention is somehow justifiable, but if their stories, and the circumstances of their capture, were more widely known, the Bush administration’s enduring mythology might be thoroughly punctured, and more substantial steps taken — or demanded — to secure their release. Bringing the stories of Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg to the American public can, hopefully, play a part in this still necessary process.

Details of this evening’s screening:

Friday January 7, 7 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington and Scott Horton.
Revolution Books, 146 West 26th Street (between 6th & 7th Ave.), New York, NY 10001.
A donation of $10 is requested for the film, drinks and popcorn, to benefit Revolution Books. For further information, see the Revolution Books website, or contact the store by email or by phone: 212-691-3345. A Facebook page is here.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

To coincide with my induction as a trusted author on Op-Ed News, I spoke to Rob Kall, Op-Ed News’ executive editor and publisher on Tuesday, for a 75-minute podcast, which will also be broadcast, in some form or other, on Rob’s Bottom Up Radio Show on WNJC 1360 AM, which runs from 9-10 pm EST on Wednesday evenings.

The show is available here, and it was excellent to have the opportunity to talk with Rob at length about the history of Guantánamo, and why, two years after taking office, President Obama has not only found himself unable to close the prison, but may also go down in history as the man whose efforts ground to a halt in 2011, leaving the majority of the 174 men held today still imprisoned at the time of the next Presidential election in November 2012.

In running through the prison’s history, I spoke about the huge gulf between the Bush administration’s claim that the prisoners in Guantánamo were “the worst of the worst,” who were all “captured on the battlefield,” and the rather less glorious truth: that the majority of the men — and boys — were sold to the US military by its Afghan or Pakistani allies for bounty payments averaging $5000 a head. I also pointed out how, on capture, none of the men were screened according to the Geneva Conventions’ competent tribunals, held close to the time and place of capture, and used to separate combatants from civiians when those detained are not wearing uniforms, even though, during the first Gulf War, around 1200 of these tribunals were held, and in three-quarters of the cases the men were sent home.

This led to the filling of Guantánamo with “Mickey Mouse prisoners,” as an early commander, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey explained, and resulted in a prison that has never held more than a few dozen genuine terrorist suspects, with the majority of the prisoners being either completely innocent men, or foot soldiers for the Taliban, recruited to fight the Northern Alliance in an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before 9/11 and had, for the most part, nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism.

Rob and I also spoke about the conflict between the prisoners’ ongoing habeas corpus petitions, and the findings of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, established by President Obama to review the Guantánamo cases in 2009, and how the mainstream media in the US has not focused enough on the court’s rulings in the habeas cases. This is in spite of the fact that the judges have regularly revealed that the goverment’s supposed evidence consists of nothing more than unreliable statements — many extracted under duress, or through the use of torture — made by the prisoners themselves, or by their fellow prisoners, and how the ongoing habeas litigation has, shamefully, been sidelined by ther administration — with the evident cooperation of Attorney General Eric Holder — in favor of the Task Force’s findings.

Turning to those findings, I explained how 90 of the 174 men still held have been cleared for release, but are still held because 58 are Yemenis (prevented from being freed by an unprincipled moratorium issued by President Obama last January), and the rest await third countries to offer them an alternative to their home countries, where they face the risk of torture. I also explained how the Task Force recommended that 33 should be put forward for some kind of trial, but that the administration is unwilling to push for federal court trials (and has recently been prevented from doing so by Congress), and is also wary of criticism from progressives regarding its revival of Bush’s Military Commissions. I also explained how the Task Force had recommended that 48 prisoners should be held indefinitely without charge or trial — even though such a notion ought to be an abomination to any American who believes in the rule of law, rather than merely genuflecting to its shadow.

There was much, much more in the show than I’ve been able to run through above, including the disgraceful and cynical fearmonering of lawmakers (Democrats as well as Republicans), and their unconstitutional interference with the President’s power to do as he sees fit regarding the closure of Guantánamo, and, towards the end, a lively exchange about the significance of WikiLeaks, including reference to my article about Julian Assange, and to the leaks revealing the suppression by the US of torture inquiries in Germany and Spain, and I do encourage you to listen, if you have the time and the inclination to know more abut Guantánamo past, present and future, as the prison is about to enter its tenth year of operations, with no end in sight.

My thanks to Rob for being an excellent host, and, once again, I’m delighted to have established a working relationship with Op-Ed News.

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) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. 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 July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.