Archive for February, 2011

For the last week, while I was in Poland, on a tour of the film “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with Polly Nash), I was, sadly, unable to keep up with the news from Egypt, although I was deeply reassured to learn, through the occasional Internet search, that the people’s revolution against the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak shows no signs of coming to an end. As I write this article, rumors are swirling that Mubarak will stand down, but as his replacement may well be the former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman (a man intimately involved in Egypt’s horrendous torture regime, and, to America’s shame, in Egypt’s leading role as a torture partner in the “War on Terror”), it is certain that this move will do nothing to persuade the protestors to return home or to give up their demands for democracy after 30 years of dictatorship.

Galvanized by the emotional TV interview of an unassuming and unlikely hero, Wael Ghonim, a Google executive who was detained on January 27, and released on Monday, the largest protests to date in the 17-day uprising took place on Tuesday. As the Guardian explained, “the largest demonstration so far took place in Cairo on Tuesday, the same day as 25 big demonstrations elsewhere in Egypt and the start of a series of strikes as trade unions joined the fray. Some stoppages are mainly about wage demands, but in the present crisis there is little doubt they are timed to support the pro-democracy movement. Tens of thousands of workers stayed away in Alexandria to demand Mubarak’s resignation. Employees of the state-run Suez Canal company, public transport workers in Cairo and iron and steel workers in other areas have also joined the strikes.”

Ghonim, who set up an online campaign, We are all Khaled Said, named after the young Egyptian whose murder at the hands of police last June provided inspiration for the protests (as I explained in my article, Torture and Despair: The Psychic Roots of the Revolution in Tunisia, Egypt and Across the Middle East), stated in his interview, “I am not a hero. I only used the keyboard, the real heroes are the ones on the ground, those I can’t name.” However, after describing his 12-day detention, and breaking down after being shown images of some of the people who have died since the uprising began on January 25, he provided a fresh wave of inspiration for protestors, as the Guardian also explained:

Ahmad Mustafa, protesting in the square, described how he had been moved by Ghonim. “I felt I could relate to him. He’s the same age as me, he’s pretty much the same background. I felt so connected to him, he portrayed me and the situation I’m in. Some of my friends who have not taken part in the demonstrations since they started are going to come today because of what they saw yesterday. It has changed something in them. Sometimes you need some kind of spark to get you to go, and that’s good.”

Mostafa Hussein, a 30-year-old activist who joined the protests, said: “It was a very emotional interview and I think it will prove to be a historical one as well.”

Others agreed. “He’s the most credible person in Egypt right now; he feels what we are all feeling,” claimed Reem El-Komi, a 25-year-old protester. Her companion, Menna, agreed. “This is my first day at the protests — the moment I saw Ghonim on TV last night I knew I had to get down to Tahrir and stand with the Egyptian people,” she said.

For the Mubarak regime, which only attracted further international criticism through the dictator’s appointment of Omar Suleiman as Vice President, the clear message of the protestors — that the entire regime must go, to be replaced by a true democratic process — remains unpalatable. On Wednesday, Diaa Rashwan, a prominent member of one of the key opposition groups, the Council of Wise Men, explained that negotiations had “essentially come to an end”. Rashwan said that he had “offered Suleiman a compromise in which Mubarak would have remained president but with his powers transferred to a transitional government,” but added that “this proposal was rejected at the weekend and there had been no further movement.”

Instead, Suleiman warned that “an escalation of the protests could unleash further repression,” telling newspaper editors, “We can’t bear this for a long time. We don’t want to deal with Egyptian society with police tools.” Speaking of “the dark bats of the night emerging to terrorise the people,” he also sounded alarms about a coup which would mean “uncalculated and hasty steps, including lots of irrationalities,” and which he described as follows: “I mean a coup of the regime against itself, or a military coup or an absence of the system. Some force, whether it’s the army or police or the intelligence agency or the [opposition Muslim] Brotherhood or the youth themselves could carry out ‘creative chaos’ to end the regime.”

As the Guardian reported, Suleiman also said that Egypt “was not ready for democracy” claiming, “The culture of democracy is still far away.” The Guardian also explained, “Some opposition activists saw Suleiman’s warning as confirmation that the government was in retreat and may be starting to panic.” Abdul-Rahman Samir, a spokesman for the coalition of the main youth groups leading the protests, responded by saying, “He is threatening to impose martial law, which means everybody in [Tahrir Square] will be smashed. But what would he do with the rest of the 70 million Egyptians who will follow us afterward? We are striking and we will protest and we will not negotiate until Mubarak steps down. Whoever wants to threaten us, then let them do so.”

A further sign that the regime is essentially out of control came from the breakdown of negotiations between the Egyptian government and the Obama administration, which has, of course, looked distinctly two-faced as it has called for Egypt to take steps towards establishing democracy while trying to downplay its direct involvement in supporting Mubarak’s brutal regime. As the Washington Post reported:

Vice President Biden spoke with Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman Tuesday, impressing on Suleiman American expectations that the regime must stop harassing journalists and human rights groups, lift its emergency law and abolish restrictions on non-official political activity. But indications are that Egypt’s rulers will not acquiesce: The country’s foreign minister called Biden’s advice “not at all” helpful on PBS’s “NewsHour” Wednesday.

In further news, the Guardian reported that the Egyptian military “has secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents since mass protests against President Hosni Mubarak began, and at least some of these detainees have been tortured.” The newsppaer added that, although the military “has claimed to be neutral … human rights campaigners say this is clearly no longer the case, accusing the army of involvement in both disappearances and torture — abuses Egyptians have for years associated with the notorious state security intelligence (SSI) but not the army.”

The Guardian also published a first-hand report, “28 hours in the dark heart of Egypt’s torture machine,” by Robert Tait, a senior correspondent with RFE/RL, who was formerly the Guardian‘s correspondent in Tehran and Istanbul, which I’m cross-posting below, as it captures the horrors of detention in Mubarak’s Egypt.

28 hours in the dark heart of Egypt’s torture machine
By Robert Tait, The Guardian, February 9, 2011

The sickening, rapid click-click-clicking of the electric shock device sounded like an angry rattlesnake as it passed within inches of my face. Then came a scream of agony, followed by a pitiful whimpering from the handcuffed, blindfolded victim as the force of the shock propelled him across the floor.

A hail of vicious punches and kicks rained down on the prone bodies next to me, creating loud thumps. The torturers screamed abuse all around me. Only later were their chilling words translated to me by an Arabic-speaking colleague: “In this hotel, there are only two items on the menu for those who don’t behave — electrocution and rape.”

Cuffed and blindfolded, like my fellow detainees, I lay transfixed. My palms sweated and my heart raced. I felt myself shaking. Would it be my turn next? Or would my outsider status, conferred by holding a British passport, save me? I suspected — hoped — that it would be the latter and, thankfully, it was. But I could never be sure.

I had “disappeared”, along with countless Egyptians, inside the bowels of the Mukhabarat, President Hosni Mubarak’s vast security-intelligence apparatus and an organisation headed, until recently, by his vice-president and former intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, the man trusted to negotiate an “orderly transition” to democratic rule.

Judging by what I witnessed, that seems a forlorn hope.

I had often wondered, reading accounts of political prisoners detained and tortured in places such as junta-run Argentina of the 1970s, what it would be like to be totally at the mercy of, and dependent on, your jailer for everything — food, water, the toilet. I never dreamed I would find out. Yet here I was, cooped up in a tiny room with a group of Egyptian detainees who were being mercilessly brutalised.

I had been handed over to the security services after being stopped at a police checkpoint near central Cairo last Friday. I had flown there, along with an Iraqi-born British colleague, Abdelilah Nuaimi, to cover Egypt’s unfolding crisis for RFE/RL, an American radio station based in Prague.

We knew beforehand that foreign journalists had been targeted by security services as they scrambled to contain a revolt against Mubarak’s regime, so our incarceration was not unique.

Yet it was different. My experience, while highly personal, wasn’t really about me or the foreign media. It was about gaining an insight — if that is possible behind a blindfold — into the inner workings of the Mubarak regime. It told me all I needed to know about why it had become hated, feared and loathed by the mass of ordinary Egyptians.

We had been stopped en route to Tahrir Square, scene of the ongoing mass demonstrations, little more than half an hour after leaving Cairo airport.

Uniformed and plainclothes police swarmed around our car and demanded our passports and to see inside my bag. A satellite phone was found and one of the men got in our car and ordered our driver to follow a vehicle in front, which led us to a nearby police station.

There, an officer subjected our fixer, Ahmed, to intense questioning: did he know any Palestinians? Were they members of Hamas? Then we were ordered to move again, and eventually drove to a vast, unmarked complex next to a telecommunications building.

That’s when Ahmed sensed real danger. “I hope I don’t get beaten up,” he said. He had good reason to worry.

We were ordered out and blindfolded before being herded into another vehicle and driven a few hundred yards. Then we were pushed into what seemed like an open-air courtyard and handcuffed. I heard the rapid-fire clicking of the electric rattlesnake — I knew instantly what it was — and then Ahmed screaming in pain. A cold sweat washed over me and I thought I might faint or vomit. “I’m going to be tortured,” I thought.

But I wasn’t. “Mr Robert, what is wrong,” I was asked, before being told, with incongruous kindness, to sit down. I sensed then that I would avoid the worst. But I didn’t expect to gain such intimate knowledge of what that meant.

After being interrogated and held in one room for hours, I was frogmarched after nightfall to another room, upstairs, along with other prisoners. We believe our captors were members of the internal security service.

That’s when the violence — and the terror — really began.

At first, I attached no meaning to the dull slapping sounds. But comprehension dawned as, amid loud shouting, I heard the electric shock rods being ratcheted up. My colleague, Abdelilah — kept in a neighbouring room — later told me what the torturers said next.

“Get the electric shocks ready. This lot are to be made to really suffer,” a guard said as a new batch of prisoners were brought in.

“Why did you do this to your country?” a jailer screamed as he tormented his victim. “You are not to speak in here, do you understand?” one prisoner was told. He did not reply. Thump. “Do you understand?” Still no answer. More thumps. “Do you understand?” Prisoner: “Yes, I understand.” Torturer: “I told you not to speak in here,” followed by a cascade of thumps, kicks, and electric shocks.

Exhausted, the prisoners fell asleep and snored loudly, provoking another round of furious assaults. “You’re committing a sin,” a stricken detainee said in a weak, pitiful voice.

Craving to see my fellow inmates, I discreetly adjusted my blindfold. I briefly saw three young men — two of them looked like Islamists, with bushy beards — with their hands cuffed behind their backs (mine were cuffed to the front), before my captors spotted what I had done and tightened my blindfold.

The brutality continued until, suddenly, I was ordered to stand and pushed towards a room, where I was told I was being taken to the airport. I received my possessions and looked at my watch. It was 5pm. I had been in captivity for 28 hours.

The ordeal was almost over — save for another 16 hours waiting at an airport deportation facility. It had been nightmarish but it was nothing to what my Egyptian fellow-captives had endured.

Later, I learned that Ahmed, the fixer, had been released at the same time as Abdelilah and me. He told friends we had been “treated very well” but that he had bruises “from sleeping on the floor”. I had flown to Cairo to find out what was ailing so many Egyptians. I did not expect to learn the answer so graphically.

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, 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.

In the litany of injustices that still permeate the “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo — including President Obama’s decision to hold 47 men indefinitely without charge or trial, the resistance by lawmakers to proposals to free prisoners cleared for release by the President’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, or to allow federal court trials for the handful of men who are genuinely accused of terrorist activities — the most disdainful disregard for notions of fairness or due process is reserved for the Yemenis, who make up over half of the 172 prisoners still held.

The Guantánamo Review Task Force — a sober collection of career officials and lawyers from government departments and the intelligence agencies — spent a year reviewing the cases of all the Guantánamo prisoners, and recommended, over a year ago, that 28 Yemenis should be released. However, when lawmakers and the right-wing media reacted with hysteria to the news that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the falled plane bomber on Christmas Day 2009, had been recruited in Yemen, President Obama responded by announcing an open-ended moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo, whch still stands to this day. In addition, this unacceptable position was reinforced in December, when Congress inserted a provision into a defense spending bill that was aimed specifically at preventing the release of prisoners to countries regarded as dangerous — a list that obviously included Yemen, given the general saber-rattling about Yemen as a nation of terrorists, which prevails in the US.

The moratorium has only been broken once, when, last summer, the administration released Mohammed Hassan Odaini, a patently innocent man who had won his habeas corpus petition, but when it comes to other Yemenis who have won their habeas petitions, the administration has openly shown its disdain for the legal process by appealing every successful petition, even when, as in the case of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, the prisoner in question was cleared for release by a military review board under the Bush administration in 2007, and demonstrably suffers from pre-existing mental health problems that have only been exacerbated by his nine years in Guantánamo.

When Latif won his habeas petition, his lawyer David Remes triumphantly told the media, “This is a mentally disturbed man who has said from the beginning that he went to Afghanistan seeking medical care because he was too poor to pay for it. Finally, a court has recognized that he’s been telling the truth, and ordered his release.” That should have been the end of the story, and Latif should have been put on board the next plane back to Yemen, but instead the government — and, specifically, the Justice Department officials under the direction of Attorney General Eric Holder — are tying themselves into knots in an effort to establish that the judge in his case, Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr., reached the wrong conclusion. As with every successful Yemeni petition (apart from that of Odaini), the government has appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court, whose Conservative leanings and dubious rulings have, over the last six months, ensured that every single habeas appeal has been won by the government. A redacted version of his lawyers’ submission to the appeals court is here (PDF).

To my mind, the case of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif shows the Obama administration at its most callous, and I explained his story at the time he won his habeas petition, and on Christmas Day, when I reflected on his plight for the benefit of any readers concerned with Christian charity on the day dedicated to the birth of Jesus. A week later, I published a harrowing letter from Guantánamo written by Latif and sent to David Remes, and as this has also had no effect, I am now publishing a follow-up letter, revealing that Latif’s mental state has not improved, and that he understandably feels thoroughly abandoned.

I urge readers concerned by the plight of Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif to write to President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder seeking his immediate release — and also the release of all the Yemenis approved for release by Obama’s Task Force, as, without any movement on freeing these men, it is now appropriate, as I explained in an article last month marking the 9th anniversary of the opening of the prison, to consider them as political prisoners, as abandoned by the law as they were in the darkest days of the Bush regime.

Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif’s latest letter from Guantánamo

To David who is carrying the flag of salvation in the middle of dangers, darkness, injustice, criminal laws, lost freedom, false claims and murdered justice in the hearts of the judges. This made me decide my end and write about it because of everything that happened to me.

The first and last stop, the scene that is unique and the path that takes anybody to an end that no one can expedite or delay it. It’s the injustice and the torture I am enduring. The torture that humiliates, wastes one’s dignity; that makes a person call for death every second; scream asking for it with no hesitation and without a second thought. Laying the body in the grave is better than laying it in fire and torture that I am enduring.

It is my life but who is going to leave me alone? Who is going to rescue me from what I am going through?

Who, whoever tastes death wishes not to return back. Why return?

A new year and a new death festival
156 from the heart to the heart
From a soul to a soul
From a human being to a human being
David: Send me the one I love and save me

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, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, 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 Cageprisoners.

Following the death at Guantánamo last week of Awal Gul, an Afghan held for nine years without charge or trial, his body was returned to his home country, where 5,000 people attended his funeral on Monday in the Najmul Jihad area of Jalalabad. With typical insensitivity, the US authorities responded to Gul’s death — apparently as the result of a heart attack after taking exercise — by claiming that he was “an admitted Taliban recruiter and commander of a military base in Jalalabad,” who “at one point allegedly operated an al-Qaeda guesthouse” and also admitted meeting with Osama bin Laden “and providing him with operational assistance on several occasions.”

These allegations were greeted by one of Gul’s lawyers, W. Matthew Dodge, as “outrageous” and “slander,” and the New York Times, which picked up on Dodge’s complaints, along with Reuters, noted that Dodge “said that his client had resigned from the Taliban, and that in three years of litigation, the government never claimed or pointed to any evidence that his client had run any Qaeda house or admitted providing support to Mr. bin Laden.”

While it is mildly reassuring that two mainstream media outlets picked up on the blatant lies peddled by the US authorities, it remains deeply depressing that Gul had never had his day in court to challenge the basis of his detention (as mandated by the Supreme Court in June 2008, when the prisoners were granted constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights), and that the Obama administration had decided that he was one of 48 prisoners who should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and I maintain, as I stated last week, that “his sad and lonely death, in a place increasingly shorn of all hope, is a depressing indictment of the US government’s ongoing and apparently permanent inability to treat the men at Guantánamo with anything other than heartless disdain.”

It would be appropriate, therefore, if Gul’s death — which has only confirmed the callousness of America in the eyes of so many Afghans — were to lead to the release or transfer of other Afghans still held in the prison, but with ferocious opposition from Congress when it comes to proposals to release any Afghans (or anyone else, for that matter), it seems unlikely that any of the two dozen or so Afghans still held in Guantánamo will be leaving anytime soon.

This will only serve to reinforce the ill-will towards the US government that was expressed at Gul’s funeral, and that was reinforced, in a genuinely restrained manner, by Muhammad Tahir, Gul’s brother-in-law, who told The News in Pakistan that family “did not know if he died [a] natural death or had been killed.” Tahir explained:

It is cruelty meted out to Awal Gul and our family. He was living in Jalalabad after the establishment of Hamid Karzai government in 2001 when he was called by a (pro-government) commander who handed him over to US Army. Neither Awal Gul was an offender nor had he gone underground. But despite this he was kept as prisoner for nine years without proof of any crime against him or trial.

Noticeably, however, Gul’s death coincided with a call for the release from Guantánamo of Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa, the Taliban’s former interior minister, and the governor of Herat prior to his capture on February 2002, which was issued by Afghanistan’s High Peace Council, a 68-member group appointed by President Karzai to assist with reconciliation efforts.

The Daily Telegraph, which reported the story, and noted that the council “risks angering [the] US” by doing so, explained that the council had decided that the release of Khairkhwa and of other Afghan prisoners held in Guantánamo “would be a confidence-building gesture needed to entice the insurgents to talks.” Mullah Arsala Rahmani, an Afghan senator and former Taliban minister, who is now the chairman of the council’s political prisoners committee, told the Telegraph that “detainees would play a role in future talks,” and stated, “Khairkhwa was an important man for the Taliban and his release would show the Americans are serious about negotiation. He is a good man and is well respected among the Taliban.”

Mullah Rahmani also noted that “a delegation had delivered [a] written request to the US last month,” and that the recommendation “had also gone to Hamid Karzai.” On Tuesday, responding to a question about the High Peace Council’s call for Mullah Khairkhwa’s release at a press conference in Kabul, the New York Times reported that President Karzai supported the move, stating, “If he wants to talk, we welcome him. We would talk to him, we would arrange his release.”

Despite President Karzai’s support for the initiative, the US government has so far failed to respond. The Telegraph noted that the Obama administration has said in the past that it welcomes “Afghan-led initiatives, particularly the efforts of the high peace council,” but “has also previously refused to include Guantánamo prisoners in any talk of a negotiation,” and also noted that the US embassy in Kabul and the US military “both declined to comment on the request.”

The Telegraph also reported that a senior Afghan government aide “said US officials were ‘not happy’ with proposals to release the 20-odd Taliban” still in Guantánamo, and outlined the Taliban’s position as follows:

The Taliban have publicly spurned talks with what they consider a puppet government until after the withdrawal of all Nato troops. Privately they are not opposed to negotiation, but first want safe conduct, prisoners released and names removed from a sanctions blacklist, according to former Taliban now on the council.

Despite the Obama administration’s stonewalling, attempts to persuade the US government to release prisoners seem likely to continue, and lawyers for Khairkhwa “confirmed they had been notified of the request.” Frank Goldsmith, of lawyers Goldsmith, Goldsmith and Dews, told the Telegraph, “We are hopeful that our government will respect the recommendation and release our client to Afghan authorities, based on the conditions in the recommendation, so that he can help in the peace process.”

Those comments sound remarkably sensible, but it remains to be seen whether good sense can permeate the barriers to meaningful discussion erected by hysterical and/or cynical lawmakers in the US, or can persuade the Obama administration to do anything that would remotely resemble decisive and constructive action on Guantánamo or the Afghan reconciliation process.

All the signs so far indicate that the door will remain closed, and that Awal Gul’s death will not even be allowed to contribute to any kind of progress either in closing Guantánamo, or contributing to the end of hostilities in Afghanistan. The lesson, as ever, seems to be that, when it comes to blind vengeance and futile aggression, the US has no intention of relinquishing the leading role it assumed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and is also unwilling to recognize, either in Afghanistan or in Guantánamo, that there are, or ever were, profound differences between al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Note: Please also see this statement by former Guantánamo prisoners from Afghanistan, including Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, calling for the release of the remaining Afghans in Guantánamo, which was published by Cageprisoners (translated from Pashtu) on January 25.

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, 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.

“‘Outside the Law’ is a powerful film that has helped ensure that Guantánamo and the men unlawfully held there have not been forgotten.”
Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

“[T]his is a strong movie examining the imprisonment and subsequent torture of those falsely accused of anti-American conspiracy.”
Joe Burnham, Time Out

As featured on Democracy Now!, ABC News and Truthout. Buy the DVD here, and please click on the image to enlarge the poster.

Throughout 2011, Andy Worthington, investigative journalist and author of The Guantánamo Files, will be touring the UK, showing the documentary “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington) and attending post-screening Q&A sessions. On some dates, Andy will be joined by former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who is now the legal director of the Guantánamo Justice Centre, Polly Nash, and other guests yet to be confirmed. Amnesty International UK is providing publicity and some support for the tour.

The 2011 UK tour follows a 35-date UK tour undertaken by Andy last year (often in the company of Omar Deghayes), and, for the most part, involves events arranged by Amnesty International student groups, following an initiative launched at the Amnesty International Student Conference at the Human Rights Action Centre in London in November 2010, where Andy was a speaker, and where he invited student groups to hold screenings.

The tour also follows screenings in the US last October and in January this year, and a week-long tour of Poland in the first week of February 2011, and also coincides with two appearances in film festivals — the D.C. Independent Film Festival in Washington D.C. on March 5, 2011, and the Bradford International Film Festival, which takes place between March 16 and 27, 2011. Further information about these screenings will be announced soon.

The intention of the tour, as with every screening, is to raise awareness of the truth about Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons and torture, explaining how the Bush administration turned its back on domestic and international laws, rounding up men and boys in Afghanistan and Pakistan without adequate screening (and often for bounty payments), and also explaining 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 focuses on the stories of three prisoners — Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who is still held, and Binyam Mohamed and Omar Deghayes (both released) — and features interviews with former prisoners Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes, lawyers Clive Stafford Smith and Tom Wilner, and journalist Andy Worthington, plus appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Imam Shakeel Begg, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Take action for Shaker Aamer!

In addition, this year’s tour focuses specifically on the ongoing plight of Shaker Aamer. Although he was cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2007, Shaker, a Saudi national with a British wife and four British children, is still held, despite the fact that, last November, he was included in a financial settlement that the British government reached with 15 former prisoners (which he obviously cannot conclude while held in Guantánamo), despite the fact that the Metropolitan Police are investigating his claims that British agents witnessed his abuse by US soldiers in a prison in Afghanistan, before his transfer to Guantánamo in February 2002, and despite the fact that the coalition government’s planned judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture abroad, announced by Prime Minister David Cameron last July, cannot legitimately start while he is still held.

In seeking to understand why Shaker Aamer has not been released, his lawyers, and everyone else who has studied his case closely, has been obliged to conclude that it is not because he poses a threat to anyone, or that he was engaged in any kind of terrorist activity, but because, as the foremost defender of the prisoners’ rights, he knows too much about the dark workings of Guantánamo, and, in particular, because, on the night in June 2006 that three men died in Guantánamo under mysterious circumstances (in contrast to the authorities’ claim that they committed suicide), Shaker has stated that he was subjected to brutal torture, and thought that he would die.

Letters to the British and American governments will be available at these events, but if you want to write now to demand Shaker’s return to his family in the UK, please visit this Amnesty International campaign page, where you can write directly to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In addition, via my site, you can also write to Foreign secretary William Hague using the template here, or write to your MP here, or write to Hillary Clinton and Daniel Fried, the US Special Envoy on Guantanamo, here.

Below is a list of eight confirmed screenings to date, plus one other speaking event that does not involve a screening. Unless otherwise noted, all events are free. Further screenings will be added to a dedicated page for the 2011 tour, and announced via new blog entries.

February 2011

Monday February 14, 6.30 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
Hamilton House, 80 Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1 3QY.
This event is organized by the University of Bristol Amnesty International Society, with support from other Bristol Amnesty groups.
For further information, please contact Sam Knight. Also see the Facebook page.

Friday February 18, 7 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
Durham University, Room ER140, Elvet Riverside, New Elvet, Durham, DH1 3JT.
This event is organized by Durham University Amnesty International Society, with the support of Durham University Law, Sociology, Politics and Anthropology Departments.
For further information, please contact Alice Thubron. Also see the Facebook page. Click on the image to enlarge the poster.

Saturday February 19, 5 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
Teviot Dining Room (Student Union building), Bristo Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9AJ.
This event is organized by the Edinburgh University Amnesty International Society and the Stirling University Amnesty group, with participation from Edinburgh Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh Napier University, Glasgow University and the University of St. Andrews.
For further information, please contact Emily Segaran. See here for information about the Teviot venues.

Wednesday February 23, 7.30 pm: Talk by Andy Worthington – “Outside the law: what next for the detainees in Guantanamo Bay?”
Latimer Room, Clare College, University of Cambridge, CB2 1TL.
I’m delighted to have been asked to speak at this event organized by Cambridge University Amnesty International society and the Cambridge Hub, a charity that connects students with causes and encourages them to help tackle the social and environmental issues that challenge us today.
The evening will begin with pre-event drinks at 7.15pm, with the 30-minute presentation starting at 7.30pm, followed by a question and answer session. Further drinks will follow the talk and provide an opportunity for students to have  further discussions with the speaker and attendees. Other recent speakers that the Student Hubs network has hosted across Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and Southampton include: Dr. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court; Professor Anthony Giddens, British sociologist; Jon Snow, British broadcaster; Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for International Development; Tim Smit, Founder of the Eden Project; and Dr. Ian Goldin, former Vice President of the World Bank. See the term card here.
For further information, please contact Ruth Graham.

March 2011

Thursday March 3, 6 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
King’s College London, Stamford Street Residence Lecture Theatre, Franklin Wilkins Building, Stamford Street, London, SE1 8WA.
This event is organized by King’s College Amnesty International Society, and has been announced as follows: “This is the highlight of our activities this term, and probably the academic year, as Andy is a great historian and an expert on Guantánamo. We are really excited about this event and the expertise Andy provides!”
For further information, please contact Ela Drazba. Also see the Facebook page.

Monday March 7, 6.30 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
Nottingham University, Room B63, Law and Social Sciences Building, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD.
This event is orgnaized by Nottingham University Amnesty International Society, as part of a week of events covering unlawful detention and torture, which includes a performance of “Rendition Monologues” by iceandfire Theatre on March 9.
For further information, please contact Alea Nasihin.

Friday March 11, 6 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
SOAS, Lucas Lecture Theatre (G2), SOAS Main Building, Thornhaugh Street, London, WC1H 0XG.
This event is organized by SOAS Student Union and SOAS Amnesty International Society.
For further information, please contact Vicky Chenery. Also see the Facebook page.

Monday March 14, 8.30 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
Warwick University, Lecture Theatre L5, Science Concourse, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry, CV4 7AJ.
This event is organized by Warwick University Amnesty International Society as part of a “Protect the Human” Week, which is starting with a day focused on terrorism and security.
Also, please note that, at 5 pm, I’ll be taking part in another event, “Question Time: Liberty v. Security — 10 Years On.” For this panel discussion, chaired by Prof. Trevor McCrisken (Warwick PAIS), I’ll be joining David Davis MP, Robin Simcox (Centre for Social Cohesion) and Ghaffar Hussain (Quilliam Foundation) to discuss the following questions: 1) Are control orders justified? 2) Is closing Guantánamo Bay feasible? 3) Islamophobia and radicalisation — myth or matter? 4) The balance between liberty and security since 9/11 — your verdict? All I can say is that, with that line-up, sparks may fly …
For further information, please contact Jesko Bartelt. Also see the Facebook page and website.

Thursday March 24, 7 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Omar Deghayes and Andy Worthington.
Cardiff University, Main Building, Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3QN.
This event is organized by Cardiff Stop the War.
For further information, please contact Adam Johannes on 07940 108146 or email.

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, and please see below for the first five minutes of the film:

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, 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.

Last Monday, Moazzam Begg (former Guantánamo prisoner and the director of the NGO Cageprisoners) and I flew out to Poland to take part in a week-long tour of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash) to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining 172 prisoners in Guantánamo (effectively abandoned by the Obama administration, and now largely held as political prisoners), and to ask the Polish people to encourage their government to help close Guantánamo by offering new homes to one or two of the 31 men cleared for release by the Obama administration, but still held because they face the risk of torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries, and to join 15 other countries (including Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia and Slovakia) in doing so.

In addition — and perhaps most crucially — Moazzam and I were looking forward to having the opportunity to discuss the existence, in the early years of the “War on Terror,” of a secret CIA torture prison at Stare Kiejkuty, near Szymany, where a number of “high-value detainees,” including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, were held, as part of a network of secret prisons that also included facilities in Thailand, Romania, Lithuania and Morocco.

This aspect of the tour is of particular relevance right now because one of the men held in Stare Kiejkuty was Abu Zubaydah, a man who, it turned out, was not a significant terrorist at all, but was, instead, the mentally damaged gatekeeper for a training camp in Afghanistan that was closed down by the Taliban in 2000 because its leader, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, refused to allow it to be taken over by Osama bin Laden. Just two weeks ago, Abu Zubaydah was granted “victim” status by the Polish Prosecutor in an ongoing investigation into the complicity of the Polish government — under former Prime Minister Leszek Miller and former President Aleksander Kwasniewski — in the establishment of the secret prison. This followed the granting of “victim” status to another “high-value detainee,” Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — allegedly the mastermind of the atack on the USS Cole in 2000 — last October.

Moazzam and I were met at the airport in Kraków by Anna Minkiewicz, a friend and supporter who, heroically and almost single-handedly, organized the tour and translated and sub-titled the film, which, in Polish, is “Poza Prawem: Echa z Guantánamo,” although she could not have done so without some heroic assistance on the subtitles, from Polly, here in the UK, and without the dedicated support in Poland of Przemysław Wielgosz, the chief editor of the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, who supplied all the contacts for the tour’s local media partners — a great group of people who not only made us welcome everywhere we went, but also arranged most of the publicity. Despite communicating by email for many years (since Anna first contacted me out of the blue with the kind of detailed and engaging email that is all too rare), we had never met, and I was looking forward to spending a week together, and also to spending a few days with Moazzam, who was only able to stay for the first two screenings in Warszawa and Łódź.

After settling in for the evening, in wonderful high-ceilinged rooms in a well-preserved building overlooking the Main Market Square (one of the largest in Europe), Anna took us, past some excellent architecture (including St. Mary’s Basilica and the Sukiennice — or Cloth Hall), to a charming little restaurant, where we happily spent a few hours in a free-wheeling discussion that touched on Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Africa, amongst other topics.

Day One: Kraków and Warszawa (Warsaw)

In the morning, we made our way across the square to a bar overlooking the Cloth Hall, for a live interview with TVN, one of the major independent TV channels in Poland, for the morning news, which was an excellent opportunity for Moazzam and I to publicize the tour, to explain why we were in Poland, and how the Polish people can help to close Guantánamo by offering new homes to cleared prisoners. I had been interviewed in London in December by another TVN reporter, Michal Sznajder, for a programme about the British government’s financial settlement with former Guantánamo prisoners (which has not yet been broadcast), so I was aware that TVN employs some fine journalists interested in covering important topics. The presenter, Marcin Sawicki, was well prepared, having watched the film the night before, and the interview is available here (in Polish), although in retrospect it was disappointing that, in the six minutes alloted to us, we didn’t have the opportunity to raise the topic of the secret CIA prison.

After the interview, while I returned to my room to catch up on emails, Moazzam and Anna visited the Jewish Quarter, where the echoes of the Holocaust obviously left a deep impression on Moazzam (who attended a Jewish school as a child), as it was something he referred to repeatedly during the rest of his visit — and in fact, as Moazzam and I both attempted to understand modern, post-Communist Poland, on our first ever visit, and the circumstances in which a government desperate for approval from the US agreed to host a secret torture prison on Polish soil, we were constantly prompted to draw analogies with the torture and brutality of the Nazis and the Soviet Union, which provide — or ought to provide — powerful resonances for the Polish people, and unassailable reasons why new atrocities should not have been allowed to happen in their country.

After a late breakfast, we then made our way to the station to catch a train to Warsaw. In Poland’s railway stations, the ghosts of the Soviet era were more tangible than they were in the streets of Kraków in particular, which was an almost miraculous survivor of the devastation of Poland by the Nazis, and is now a major tourist attraction, but the trains, although old and slow for the most part, were a delight, with the kind of six- or eight-person compartments that have now vanished from Britain, but which have a particular charm and intimacy not replicated in modern, open-plan carriages.

Our first stop in Warsaw was Kino Muranów, where we were met by the tall and enthusiastic figure of Bartek Kurzyca of the Globale political collective, which has connections in Berlin and Montevideo, and which was the media partner for our events in Warsaw.

The first of these was a press conference with Bartlomiej Jankowski, the lawyer for Abu Zubaydah, a smart and serious man who greeted us warmly, and added depth and resonance to our introduction to the Polish media. It was a great pleasure to meet him, and the press conference was a success, with Moazzam and I interviewed afterwards by Wojciech Cegielski of Polskie Radio and Adam Krzykowski of the State broadcaster TVP. At 6 pm, TVP broadcast a report on the press conference in its news programme “Panorama,” which was useful and important.

Moazzam and Anna and I actually watched the “Panorama” report in the office of Mikołaj Pietrzak, the lawyer for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, where we had a meeting (after dropping our bags off at our hotel) that also included Irmina Pacho of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, which played a crucial role last summer in obtaining the flight logs for the flights in and out of Stare Kiejkuty between December 2002 and September 2003, and I wrote about the flight logs last August, in an article entitled New Evidence About Prisoners Held in Secret CIA Prisons in Poland and Romania and followed up with Will Poland’s Former Leaders Face War Crimes Charges for Hosting Secret CIA Prison? This was when I first made contact with Adam Bodnar of the Helsinki Foundation — a contact that led me, on this trip, to make contact with Bartlomiej Jankowski, Mikołaj Pietrzak and Irmina Pacho.

The meeting with the lawyers was particularly useful, reassuring them that their cause has not been forgotten, that it is being watched with intense interest by lawyers, activists and other decent-minded people in countries around the world (including the US and the UK) and that, despite large-scale indifference in Poland, it was also possible to stir up interest through the film and the tour, and to establish important contacts across the country, and the building blocks for a network of interested parties who can move forward with their shared interests. The meeting was also extremely useful for providing Moazzam and I with strategies for the future, and I was delighted to receive English language translations of various important documents — as well as new and relevant information — that I’ll be writing about in another article in the very near future.

From Mikołaj Pietrzak’s office, we returned to Kino Muranów, where it was enormously satisfying to discover that the cinema was packed, and that at least 200 people had turned up to watch the film’s first public outing in Poland. After we had sneaked off, during the screening, for some food — which turned out to be a surreal meal in a Vietnamese vegan restaurant where we had to order our food based solely on rather lurid photos — we returned for the Q&A session, and were joined by  Draginja Nadażdin, the director of Amnesty International Poland (which provided some support for the tour), and had our first taste of the dedication with which Polish audiences pursue opportunities to ask questions.

Day Two: Warszawa (Warsaw) and Łódź

On Wednesday morning, after breakfast and a quick tour of the centre of Warsaw, painstakingly reconstructed after its complete destruction by the Nazis, we took a taxi to the outskirts of town, to a studio where Moazzam and I were interviewed for a documentary about the secret prison that is being made by Roman Kurkiewicz, a veteran of the Solidarity movement (Solidarnosc), and also a journalist, author and professor, and the kind of principled revolutionary pro-democracy figure that I admired while watching the rise of Solidarity from afar 30 years ago. The documentary promises to be excellent, and I made sure that Roman knew that I would be delighted to tour it and make it available in the UK and the US if he makes an English version.

From the studio, we rushed to the station to catch the train to Łódź, where we were met by Marek Jedliński of of Krytyka Polityczna, and, at the cinema, his wife and the two translators for the evening. With some time to spare, we had an opportunity to chat, to enjoy some home-cooked food on sale in the basement of the cinema (which is also a cinema museum, with some wonderful old projectors filling the corners of various rooms), and also to be photographed (see the photos here and here) prior to an interview, during the screening (when we again retired downstairs), with Moazzam and I, which was conducted by a reporter from the Polish news agency Polska Agencja Prasawa, and which formed the basis of an article (available here in Polish) in the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

For the second night, the cinema was packed out, with around 100 people, and the screening was followed by another lively Q&A session (audio here, in Polish and English), in which Moazzam, Anna and I were also joined by Wojciech Makowski of Amnesty International Poland. With translators (not available in Warsaw), it was, I think, a more satisfying Q&A session, with all the major topics covered, and a true abhorence of torture vividly expressed in various quarters of the crowd.

Afterwards, when I had let Wojciech Makowski know that I was happy for Amnesty to use my list of the remaining prisoners to encourage Amnesty members to write to the prisoners in Guantánamo (and also see here), the organizers took us to Ganesh, an excellent Indian restaurant, where we chatted away merrily and devoured butter chicken, garlic naan, and, in my case, some rather fine mutton with spinach, before retiring to our hotel. With two days completed, it was obvious that the tour was proving to be a great success.

Day Three: Poznań

After a late night in our hotel, in a block with an evident Soviet history, where Moazzam and I, who were sharing a room, stayed up talking about the tour, about Shaker Aamer, about anti-terror legislation in the UK, and about the plight of the Yemenis in Guantánamo (and I then retired to the bathroom to write Guantánamo: A Tale of Two Tunisians, letting Moazzam sleep), I awoke to find that Moazzam had already left for the station, to catch a train to Warsaw and a flight home. After breakfast, Anna and I returned to the station for the next stage of our journey, to Poznań, where we met up again with Draginja Nadażdin, the director of Amnesty International Poland, for a screening in another arthouse cinema, Kino Rialto.

The publicity in Poznań had been very last-minute, so there was not a huge audience, but the 30 or so people who did attend were refreshingly committed, and, after Anna, Draginja and I had grabbed some food in the only nearby place that wasn’t McDonald’s (a little pasta place), we had an excellent Q&A session, honing our messages about dispelling the lies about Guantánamo, and pushing for the resettlement of cleared prisoners and greater visibility for the topic of the torture prison.

Day Four: Wrocław

On Friday morning, after filling up on coffee and breakfast at our well-appointed hotel — where, the day before, I had thought the recent smoking ban in Poland didn’t apply, because the owner was so brazenly smoking in his own dining room — Anna and I took the train to Wrocław (formerly known as Breslau, and handed over from German to Polish control after the Second World War), where we were met by Aneta Jerska of Falanster, a collective of young activists with a lovely bookshop, and fine food and coffee, where we got to relax for an hour or so after dropping our bags off at the no-frills, Soviet-era Hotel Polonia, complete with sullen staff.

From Falanster, we made our way to Kino Warszawa, a delightfully unreconstructed old cinema (in a country with its fair share of unreconstructed old cinemas) inside a splendid old building, where I was introduced to my translator for the evening, and also to Józef Pinior, our very special guest. A former member of the Solidarity movement, he was an MEP from 2004 to 2009, and, crucially, was first a member, and then the Vice-Chair of the Subcommittee of Human Rights, where he worked with other MEPs, including the UK’s Sarah Ludford, on a crucial investigation into renditions in Europe in the “War on Terror,” which was published in January 2007, and entitled, “Report on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transportation and illegal detention of prisoners” (PDF, and see the resolution here).

As a result of his investigations, Józef Pinior came across information in Poland establishing that the Polish government not only sanctioned the establishment of a secret CIA prison in Poland, but was actively involved in it (as will be discussed in more detail in a forthcoming article). Despite this, he found himself ridiculed in Poland by those he sought to expose, although his presence on Friday — and the rare opportunity to discuss the secret prison in a public forum — drew the most spirited audience of the tour, anxious to debate ways to take the story forward, and, from feedback I received afterwards, grateful that Anna and I had brought the film to Wrocław, that I was bringing news of interest in the story of the prison from outside Poland, and that Józef Pinior had an opportunity to explain what he knew to a sympathetic audience, and was able to assert that the Prosecutor’s granting of “victim” status to Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri establishes, beyond any doubt, that both men were held in the secret prison at Stare Kiejkuty.

After the screening and the Q&A session, a group of us — including Józef Pinior, Anna, Aneta and I — found a wonderful Armenian restaurant around the corner from the cinema, with great food (my beef and spinach was excellent), where we discussed the secret prison, Pinior’s investigations, and the state of politics in Poland, enabling to understand more about how he could have been so thoroughly sidelined by politicians and the media.

We also proceeded more generally to discuss the dangers of unchecked global capitalism , especially in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the failure of governments to legislate against the banking sector, or to hold anyone accountable, and the need for new political responses. As throughout my visit, I was happy to point out that savage ideological cuts in the UK have provoked significant resistance by students and scholchildren, but also to concede that it does not yet constitute a new political movement, and broad coalitions (as with Solidarity) and further spurs to erode complacency and apathy will be needed before there is any real hope of a paradigm shift in the problems of the West.

Day Five: Kraków

For the last screening of the tour, Anna and I took a four and a half hour train ride back to Kraków, arriving with time to drop our cases off at Anna’s apartment, and to make our way to Kino Agrafka, another lovely arthouse cinema in a rambling old building, where another lively audience, of about 50 people, had forsworn the more recreational attractions of a Saturday night for an evening of arbitrary detention and torture. I was, by now, clinging to consciousness somewhat, but a Polish speciality for dinner — tasty meat and vegetable stew served inside a hollowed-out loaf of bread — and a few coffees brought me back to life a little for the final Q&A session of the tour, and afterwards Anna and I retired to a bar with one of the audience members.

Unwinding after an intense but rewarding week was a precursor to my final day in Kraków, which involved sleeping, eating, shopping and chatting before my flight back on Monday morning. It was not the easiest week I have ever had, as I received the sad news on Thursday evening that my father had passed away suddenly, which was difficult to deal with so far from home, but it was a very worthwhile trip, and I am deeply grateful to Anna for organizing it and funding it, and also for being there for me when I received the news about my father’s death.

In combatting the injustices of the “War on Terror,” and calling for accountability for America’s torturers (and their allies), those of us working in the US and the UK over the last nine years have realized that it is a long road, and not one for those seeking instant results. I hope that my presence, and that of Moazzam, helped to raise awareness of this amongst Poland’s anti-torture activists, as well as reassuring them that they are not alone, and I hope also that, with Anna, we helped to keep the story of the secret prison — and of cleared prisoners in Guantánamo who need new homes — alive in the media.

From my point of view, the trip was worth it alone for the audiences who saw the film and engaged in the Q&A sessions, for the media interest, and for the contacts I established with activists, lawyers and journalists, but I’m also pleased that it was more than just the sum of its parts — that Anna was such an engaging host, and that there are so many lovely people in Poland.

Note: In Poznań and Kraków, university lecturers who attended the screenings asked for (and received) copies of the film, to arrange screenings in their universities and to use in lecture topics for their students. I would like to encourage more people to do this, and also hope that there will be interest in making the sub-titled version of the film available on DVD. Please contact me (or Anna Minkiewicz if  writing in Polish) if this is of interest.

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, 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 Cageprisoners.

I’m posting below an essay about Guantánamo, written as a school project by Sammie Killmer, a sixth-grade schoolgirl in Denver, Colorado, who understands more about Guantánamo and the men held there than most adults in a position of influence in the United States.

This is not coincidental, as her father is Darold Killmer, an attorney whose law firm represents five prisoners still in Guantánamo: Musa’ab Omar Al Madhwani (ISN 839), Abdul Rahman Al Qyati (ISN 461), Sa’ad Al Azani (ISN 575), Jalal Salim Bin Amer (ISN 564) and Suhail Abdu Anam (ISN 569) [see here, here and here for more information about these men]. However, as Darold explained to me in an email, “The teacher’s assignment asked the kids to write an opinion piece on an issue that interested them. Sammie chose Gitmo … All of the work is her own, from information that she and I have talked about over the years, from individual research she did, and from an interview she had with my law partner Mari Newman (Sammie was not allowed to interview me for the project).”

I hope you enjoy the perspective of this particular 11-year old girl as much as I did, and I was especially taken by the way in which, cutting through the usual nonsense about the nameless, faceless “terrorists” in Guantánamo, Sammie provided five thumbnail portraits of her father’s clients, as provided by Mari Newman, which do more to bring these particular men to life as individual human beings than anything the US media has managed to accomplish in nine years.

Guantánamo Bay: want to hear an 11 year old girl’s opinion?
By Sammie Killmer

Cuba/Washington DC: What is Guantánamo Bay (also known as Gitmo)? Though at the most Guantánamo Bay had over 775 prisoners, many have been released, but 173 prisoners still remain. This camp was open by the Bush administration since 2002 and President Obama said it would be closed in early 2009 but it still holds 173 prisoners and isn’t closed. It is very disappointing that President Obama said he would have it closed last year and he did not keep his promise. To me it seems that Guantánamo will never close. Many of the prisoners held were and are not terrorists. In fact, many of the prisoners still being held are innocent.

Another problem I have with Gitmo is that some prisoners are on hunger strike and that the guards have the nerve to force feed them. What they do to force food down another person’s throat is just sad. It’s awful.

There are three major camps and seven sub camps. Camp Delta is the biggest camp with seven sub camps. There is also Camp Iguana which use to hold prisoners 18 and younger, but now it holds some detainees set for release back to their home countries. On some websites it claims prisoners at Camp Iguana are allowed TV and to shower twice day, but on the Internet a lot of the articles and information is only the government’s side of the story and not the whole truth.

The number of prisoners left is very, very disappointing: 173 men left at the camp. Also their nationalities are all middle eastern. Over the years the camp has held detainees from Australia, England and other countries, but they have almost all been released. Now the main population is middle eastern men. Some have even been cleared for release.  When you think about someone being cleared to leave camp you think of their last day, but some men have been waiting months and even years because they are set for clearance but the guards and government do not release them back to their home countries.

I had a wonderful opportunity to chat with a Guantánamo Bay Lawyer Mari Newman who has been recognized by the ACLU Civil Rights award for working on this case.

Here is a summary of my interview with her (I did ask for non-classified information):

“How many clients do your firm Killmer, Lane and Newman have?”

“Five”

“How long do you usually meet with them?”

“If their case is going on, all day, but if not half day”

“Are the guards harsh on what they are the permitted to say?”

“The guards are not in the room but there is a camera in the hut and the detainees are chained to the floor”

“Was it hard to get security clearance to go to Guantánamo?”

“Yes it took a long time”

“What briefly was the process to getting cleared?”

“You fill out a very long form with everything about you: where you have lived in the past, past jobs, places you have traveled, everything. A lot of people you know are interviewed”

“How many people are cleared at Killmer, Lane and Newman?”

“There are five of us, Darold, David, Sara, Siddhartha and myself”

“Do you think that all 173 prisoners will be released and Gitmo closed by the end of Obama’s term?”

“No I don’t”

“How would you explain each client?”

“Ok well –

Musa’ab — he was very funny before he was imprisioned in Gitmo. He is still very funny. He has been there since the end of October 2002. He also enjoys soccer.

Abdul Rahman — He is a poet. He is calm. He also loves cream puffs and all types of sweets.

Suhail — He is on hunger strike. He is force-fed. He also likes to read books about all different cultures.

Sa’ad — He is very religious and studies religion. He is shy and quiet.

And Jalal — He talks very fast and likes pictures of very beautiful animals.”

“How do you think Guantánamo affects America’s reputation internationally?”

“Terrible because historically America has been a symbol of freedom and known for our three unalienable rights life, liberty and property and it gives us a terrible reputation.”

We also talked  about how only four Gitmo cases have made it to the supreme court and the supreme court ruled in favor of the detainees in all of them but in the court of appeals many detainees have been ruled against though some have won.

The Guantánamo Bay issue upsets me because it is hard to believe that the US government just thrown people in prison and do nothing with them. I am very disappointed and upset how America has treated many innocent men. I cannot believe it. It’s sad what we have done. I would like to end this with a Ben Franklin quote given to me by Mari Newman:

“Those who give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”
– BEN FRANKLIN

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, 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.

The Second World War lasted for six years, and at the end of it prisoners of war were released to resume their lives. At Guantánamo, on the other hand, the prison has just marked the ninth anniversary of its opening, and on Thursday the Pentagon announced that Awal Gul, a 48-year old Afghan prisoner, who had been held for nine years without charge or trial and was scheduled to be held forever, died in a shower after suffering a heart attack. Gul had never been held as a prisoner of war, and despite the US government’s assertions that he could be held forever, no one in a position of authority — neither President Bush nor President Obama — had ever adequately demonstrated that he constituted a threat to the United States.

From what is known of Gul’s story, he had run a weapons depot in his home town in eastern Afghanistan, after the end of the Soviet occupation, and had then run it on behalf of the Taliban after their rise to power in 1996. However, in his tribunal at Guantánamo, as I explained in a profile of him two years ago:

Gul said that he had resigned from the Taliban … and, in a volte-face that was typical of Afghan politics, had begun working with the pro-US warlord Hazrat Ali, one of three Afghan commanders who had fought at Tora Bora on the Americans’ behalf [Tora Bora being the site of a showdown, in December 2001, between al-Qaeda and senior Taliban supporters on the one hand, and a proxy Afghan army directed by US Special Forces on the other]. He explained that, on Ali’s advice, he handed himself in to Northern Alliance commanders in Kabul in February 2002, in an attempt to quell rumors about his involvement with the Taliban, but was then handed over to the Americans.

Whether there was any truth to this story had still not been clearly established after nine years, when, as Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese, a Guantánamo spokesman, explained, Gul had been working out on Tuesday night in Camp 6, and then “went to go take a shower and apparently collapsed in the shower.” Cmdr. Reese added, “Detainees on the cellblock then assisted him in getting to the guard station,” and from there he was taken to a clinic, and then to the Navy base hospital, which is some distance from the prison blocks, where he died despite “extensive life saving measures.”

Unlike the six other deaths at Guantánamo — the three heavily disputed deaths in June 2006, which appear to have involved a secret torture team operating in a secret facility outside Guantánamo’s main perimeter fence rather than the authorities’ claim that the men committed suicide simultaneously, two other alleged suicides in May 2007 and June 2009, and the death by cancer of an unrecognized hero of the anti-Taliban resistance in December 2007 — the death of Awal Gul at least appears straightforward.

Nevertheless, the US government should be ashamed that it has presided over the death of a man whose claims that he was mistakely detained had never been the subject of a judicial ruling, despite the fact that he, along with all the Guantánamo prisoners, had been granted habeas corpus rights by the US Supreme Court two years and eight months ago.

In Gul’s defense, his lawyer, Matthew Dodge, an Atlanta-based federal public defender, said that documents in the possession of the US government proved that Gul “had quit the Taliban a year before the Sept. 11 terror attacks,” as the Miami Herald explained. Dodge and Gul’s other lawyer, Brian Mendelsohn, also stated, “Mr. Gul was kind, philosophical, devout, and hopeful to the end, in spite of all that our government has put him through … The government charged that he was a prominent member of the Taliban and its military, but we proved that this is false. Indeed, we have documents from Afghanistan, even a letter from Mullah Omar himself on Taliban letterhead, discussing Mr. Gul’s efforts to resign from the Taliban a year or more before 9/11/01. He resigned because he was disgusted by the Taliban’s growing penchant for corruption and abuse. Mr. Gul was never an enemy of the United States in any way.”

The lawyers added, “It is a shame that the government will finally fly him home not in handcuffs and a hood, but in a casket.” FBI reports, included in his habeas petition, not only stated that Gul had 18 children (seven boys and eleven daughters), but also described him as “a former Taliban commander,” and noted that, in June 2008, he told a San Diego-based FBI agent that he was “tired from war and thirsty for peace.”

In contrast, US Southern Command responded to news of Gul’s death by issuing a statement claiming that he was “an admitted Taliban recruiter and commander of a military base in Jalalabad,” who “at one point,” as the Miami Herald put it, “allegedly operated an al-Qaeda guesthouse.” The use of “allegedly” in the second part of that claim rather undermines the credibility of that particular allegation, and as for the first, Gul’s time as a recruiter and commander clearly relates to the period before the disillusionment that he expressed, and that was confirmed by the FBI.

The Southcom statement also claimed that Gul “admitted to meeting with Osama bin Laden and providing him with operational assistance on several occasions,” but Gul himself told his tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004 that, although he had seen bin Laden on three occasions, “the first time in 1990 in a gathering for ‘rich Saudis” who had come to build a hospital and school,” he was “unaware that the al-Qaeda founder was anti-American,” and had not been involved in providing any kind of operational assistance.

Gul’s lawyers called the Southcom statement “outrageous,” and explained:

The government, through this post-death statement, makes claims more outlandish even than the government lawyers in Mr. Gul’s habeas case. We now hear for the very first time in the nearly 10 years since Mr. Gul’s arrest, that (1) he operated a guesthouse for Al-Qaeda members, and (2) that he admitted providing bin Laden operational support on several occasions. Over the course of almost 3 years in court, the government has never provided any evidence at all to support this slander. Neither Mr. Gul not any credible witness has ever said such things.

Other allegations are equally worthless. Responding to an allegation that he had trained on Stinger missiles (portable surface-to-air missiles used to bring down planes and helicopters), Gul stated that he had indeed trained to use them, but had done so in the 1980s, when the US supplied the missiles to Afghan mujahideen resisting the Soviet occupation.

The Miami Herald also revealed that, last March, District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer had heard oral arguments from both sides in Gul’s habeas corpus petition, but for some reason had failed to reach a decision in his case.

The final blow, however, came from Matthew Dodge, who explained that President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, comprising over 60 career officials and lawyers from government departments and the intelligence services, who reviewed all the Guantánamo cases in 2009, had designated Gul as one of 48 prisoners who should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, meaning that, even if his habeas petiton had been granted by Judge Collyer, the decision taken by an unaccountable executive Task Force would have led to an appeal, almost certainly consigning him to continued indefinite detention, possibly for the rest of his life.

How this is supposed to constitute anything resembling justice or fairness is beyond me, and I can only conclude that, not only was Awal Gul betrayed by the US authorities, but also that any of the other 47 men designated for indefinite detention without charge or trial (whose identities have not been publicly disclosed, although they are known to their lawyers) must be reflecting today that, a year from now, or five years from now, or ten, 15 or 20 years from now, they too might die of a heart attack in the living grave of Guantánamo, only to have the US government respond by wheeling out whatever untested allegations it has on file that can be brandished to create the illusion that they were beneath contempt.

I never met Awal Gul, of course, and, as I have stated, I have no idea whether or not his story was true, but even the US government never attempted to claim that he was actually involved in any terrorist activities, and I can only state, in closing, that his sad and lonely death, in a place increasingly shorn of all hope, is a depressing indictment of the US government’s ongoing and apparently permanent inability to treat the men at Guantánamo with anything other than heartless disdain.

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, 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 Cageprisoners.

Two weeks ago, in light of the uprising in Tunisia that brought to an end the 23-year reign of terror of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, I wrote an article about the twelve Tunisians held in Guantánamo throughout the prison’s nine-year history — the two men transferred to Tunisia in June 2007, who were subsequently imprisoned after show trials, the two men transferred to Italian custody in December 2009 to face terrorism-related charges, the three men freed in third countries in 2010, and the five still held in Guantánamo — and wondered what would happen to them in light of the startling developments in their homeland, which they had all fled many years before their capture in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and their subseqent rendition to Guantánamo.

In the last week, there have been two significant developments. In the first, former Guantánamo prisoner Abdallah Hajji (also identified as Abdullah bin Amor), who is 55 years old, was freed from prison in Tunisia “as part of a promise by the interim government to free all political prisoners.” A former member of the previously banned Islamist political party Ennahdha, whose leader, Rachid Ghanouchi, returned from exile in France just two days earlier, Hajji, who was seized in April 2002 in Pakistan, where he had been living with his wife and children since fleeing Tunisia in 1989, had, in 1995, been sentenced in absentia to ten years in prison, on terrorism-related charges that his lawyer was convinced had been extracted through the torture and abuse of other prisoners in Tunisian custody. When Hajji was forcibly returned to Tunisia in June 2007, he was abused and threatened in custody, and then subjected to a show trial in which he received a seven-year sentence. His release therefore overturns this sentence, and confirms that he was being held as a political prisoner.

In the press report announcing Hajji’s release, it was also noted that the other man repatriated from Guantánamo with him, who was not named but is Lotfi Lagha, is also a free man, having been freed last June, three years after his return and a show trial in October 2007, in which he was given a three-year sentence.

While the freeing of a political prisoner formerly held in Guantánamo vindicates Abdallah Hajji, and must provide hope for many other Tunisian political prisoners, both inside Tunisia and elsewhere, the news from Italy, which coincided with the announcement about Hajji, was rather less encouraging. Mohammed Tahir Riyadh Nasseri, who was transferred from Guantánamo in December 2009 with another Tunisian, Adel Ben Mabrouk bin Hamida Boughanmi, was convicted on Monday of “criminal association with the aim of terrorism and sentenced to six years in prison.” His lawyer, Roberto Novellino, said he would appeal the verdict.

Nasseri may well be guilty of the charges against him, but what concerns me is that, on his transfer to Italy, it was made clear that Italian prosecutors were relying on a key witness, Lazhar Ben Mohamed Tlil, a terrorist suspect turned informant, who was apparently having second thoughts about his co-operation.

What also concerns me is the weakness of the evidence against Nasseri from Guantánamo which, essentially, boiled down to a single claim that he was “the head of the Tunisians in Afghanistan.” As I explained at the time of his transfer to Italy:

[This] may, of course, be true, but what makes it suspicious in the context of the intelligence-gathering at Guantánamo is that it comes from an allegation that he was “identified by a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant as having trained at the Khaldan camp and that he eventually took over as the Emir of the Tunisian Group in Afghanistan.”

References to “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant” in proceedings at Guantánamo invariably refer to “high-value detainees,” who, at the time, were held in secret CIA prisons where they were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; in other words, where they were tortured.

There is, of course, no indication as to who this particular “high-value detainee” was, but as the reference is to the Khaldan training camp, it seems likely that the allegation was made either by Abu Zubaydah (the gatekeeper of the camp, and the CIA’s most well-known torture victim, along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) or by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the CIA’s most famous “ghost prisoner.” Tortured in Egypt in 2002, al-Libi made a false confession about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein that was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Rendered to various other prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA in the four years that followed, he was returned to Libya in 2006, where he died in May [2009], reportedly by committing suicide.

As for the other Tunisians held — or formerly held — in Guantánamo, the signs, as anticipated, are that the three men released in third countries (because of their legitimate fears that, if returned, they would be abused, subjected to show trials and imprisoned like Abdallah Hajji and Lotfi Lagha), would now like to return home, although, as yet, there is no sign that any formal application to do so has been made — or, indeed, if their host countries, or the US, would object. These men are Rafiq al-Hami, who was released in Slovakia last January with two other men (from Egypt and Azerbaijan), Saleh Sassi, who was released in Albania in February last year (with an Egyptian and a Libyan), and Hedi Hammamy, who was released in Georgia last March (with two Libyans).

Of the five men still held in Guantánamo, I noted two weeks ago the likelihood that only one, Lotfi bin Ali (also identified as Mohammed Abdul Rahman) has been cleared for release by the Obama administration’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed the cases of all the Guantánamo prisoners throughout 2009, and recommended that, of the 173 men still held, 89 should be released, 33 should face trials and 48 should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

I also noted that, since a judge intervened to prevent his involuntary repatriation in October 2007, “no new home has been found for bin Ali in the last three years and four months, although now, presumably, there is no obstacle to his release, which should be demanded immediately,” and I maintain that there should be immediate calls for his repatriation, as it is, presumably, no longer unsafe for him to return. On this point, however, it may be that the Obama administration, or Congress — which has unconstitutionally asserted that it has a right to review prisoner releases before they occur — may conclude that, although a US judge ruled that Tunisia under Ben Ali was an unsafe destination for the return of Tunisian prisoners, post-dictatorship Tunisia may not yet be regarded as a safe option on the basis of “national security” concerns. I sincerely hope that this is not the case, as it will only demonstrate, as wth Egypt, how much America loves its dictators, but I have to concede that it is not beyond the realms of possibility.

The other four men, however, remain in limbo. One, Ridah al-Yazidi, was cleared for relase under the Bush administration, although it is unclear if Obama’s Task Force reached a similar conclusion, and the other three apparently face extradition to other countries to face trial. The Belgian govermment has expressed an interest in extraditing Adel Hakeemy (also cleared for release under President Bush) in connection with terrorist allegations in Belgium, as it has with Hisham Sliti, who, in addition, lost his habeas corpus petition in December 2008, and the Italian government has expressed an interest in extraditing Abdul Ourgy (who was also cleared for release under Bush).

Given that four of the five men remaining in Guantánamo were cleared under President Bush, there is clearly an argument to be made that the simplest solution would be to repatriate all four men, but, as mentioned in relation to Lotfi bin Ai, there is no guarantee that, given the current political climate in the US, President Obama has any interest in proposing that any of the men currently held in Guantánamo should be released, and it may well be that the Tunisians will remain imprisoned — victims not of anything resembling justice, but of a state of political expediency on Obama’s part, and of hysteria in Congress and the right-wing media, which is preventing any moves being made to bring the sordid history of Guantánamo 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, 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 Cageprisoners.

For the United States and other Western countries, the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt (which threaten to spread to other countries, including Yemen and Algeria) are something of a nightmare. Just as the authorities in these countries are struggling — and failing — to cope with popular uprisings, so too the United States and other Western countries are rudderless when faced with an undefined enemy — and make no mistake about it, the people of foreign countries are the enemy when their revolts against dictatorship threaten Western interests.

Only the most perceptive people in the West realize that, for decades, the perceived threat of communism, and, in recent years, the perceived threat of Islamists, has led their governments to support the dictatorial regimes that are now being challenged or overwhelmed by ordinary people whose eruptions of revolutionary anger are largely spontaneous and leaderless, and, as such, cannot easily be suppressed.

What will happen next is unknown. It is no wonder that the West is getting jittery, but it is difficult to see how Western governments will be able to maintain their influence when the revolutionary movements know that, although they have been oppressed by their own rulers — kept in poverty, deprived of work, and often subjected to torture, arbitrary detention, disappearances, and extrajudicial execution — their rulers have largely been able to abuse them so thoroughly because of the backing of the West.

The horrors of the Cold War are behind us, but on the Islamist front, it is all too easy to see how the United States, in particular, enlisted the support of the dictatorial regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Morocco in its “War on Terror,” drawing on their expertise in torture to host secret torture prisons on behalf of the CIA, where dozens of men and boys — seized in other countries and subjected to “extraordinary rendition” — were delivered, some of whom have never been seen or heard from again.

It is also easy to see how numerous countries, including the U.K. and France, responded to the Islamic Salvation Front’s first-round electoral victory in Algeria in 1991 by backing a military takeover that led to an almost unspeakably horrendous civil war, while protecting Western interests in Algeria’s supplies of oil and gas, and how Libya — previously a pariah — was also drawn into the “War on Terror,” when Colonel Gaddafi, with his plenteous supplies of oil, also joined the Western alliance.

With Libya, the hypocrisy was laid bare — although few realize it — when political refugees to the U.K., whose claims for asylum had been accepted, were suddenly labeled as terrorist suspects and imprisoned, or held under control orders (a pernicious form of house arrest) without charge or trial, and on the basis of secret evidence, after Gaddafi became a British ally in 2005.

Although judges intervened independently to prevent the involuntary repatriation of these men, ruling that “diplomatic assurances,” which were supposed to guarantee humane treatment on their return, were fundamentally untrustworthy, the control orders against the men were only finally dropped in the last few years when the Gaddafi regime began a program of reconciliation with its former opponents.

The West’s hypocrisy in the “War on Terror” also included Tunisia and the brutal regime of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali (whose fall is leading to hopes that the terrorist stigma attached to his former political opponents might now be exposed for what it was), and, of course, Syria, whose fearsome Mukhabarat (secret police) tortured at least nine CIA “ghost prisoners” in 2001 and 2002, even as Bush’s speechwriters were including the regime in an “axis of evil.” A few of these prisoners — who included teenagers rendered from Pakistan — have resurfaced (most notably, the Canadian citizen Maher Arar), but others remain unaccounted for.

Of all the allies in torture, however, Egypt was the most prominent, the final bloody destination for those seized in America’s first forays into “extraordinary rendition” under President Clinton, and the place where, in the “War on Terror,” an untold number of men were disappeared.

Just a few of these stories are known, but they expose the true horrors of America’s relationship with Egypt. One prominent victim is Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen, seized on a bus in Pakistan, who was rendered to Egypt before being sent to Guantánamo (and released in January 2005). Providing a dark insight into why Hosni Mubarak’s decision to appoint intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as vice president on Saturday is the worst possible move for Egyptians seeking total regime change, the author and journalist Richard Neville, drawing on Habib’s memoir, reported:

Habib was interrogated by the country’s Intelligence Director, General Omar Suleiman … Suleiman took a personal interest in anyone suspected of links with Al-Qaeda. As Habib had visited Afghanistan shortly before 9/11, he was under suspicion. Habib was repeatedly zapped with high-voltage electricity, immersed in water up to his nostrils, beaten, his fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks … To loosen Habib’s tongue, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a gruesomely shackled Turkistan prisoner in front of Habib — and he did, with a vicious karate kick.

Another prominent torture victim is Abu Omar (Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr), an Egyptian cleric who was brazenly kidnapped from a street in Milan in February 2003, by CIA operatives and their Italian counterparts. In November 2009, an Italian judge handed down, in absentia, a sentence of between five and eight years to 22 CIA agents and a U.S. Air Force colonel for their part in Abu Omar’s kidnap and rendition (and two Italian agents received three-year sentences), but not before Abu Omar had been imprisoned in Egypt for four years, and, during much of that time, subjected to torture.

The most significant story of all, however, is that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan, which was closed down by the Taliban in 2000, when he refused to cooperate with Osama bin Laden. After his capture in December 2001 — in Afghanistan, or crossing the border into Pakistan — al-Libi was rendered to Egypt by the CIA, where, under torture, he falsely confessed that al-Qaeda representatives had been meeting Saddam Hussein to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. Despite the fact that al-Libi later recanted his false testimony, it was used by the United States to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, figuring prominently in Colin Powell’s presentation to the U.N. the month before.

After visits to other torture prisons run by or on behalf of the CIA, al-Libi was eventually returned to Libya, where he died in prison in May 2009, allegedly by committing suicide — although no one who knows anything about “suicides” in Libyan jails believed that particular story. His death was convenient for at least three countries — Libya itself, and the two countries responsible for the deadly lie about Iraq; namely, Egypt and the United States.

More than anything else, the story of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi defines the blood-soaked relationship between the Bush administration and the brutal regime of Hosni Mubarak, and if there is to be genuine change in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, then the Obama administration and other Western governments need to step back from supporting torturers or enlisting their torture assistance or making convenient arrangements with them to establish secret dungeons in their countries to pursue their own repulsive agendas.

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, 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 the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Revolution in Egypt — and the Hypocrisy of the U.S.”

Last Friday, Ken Ota of the newspaper Revolution asked me to do a phone interview to discuss the recent announcement that President Obama was planning a new series of trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo, to explain the significance of this announcement, and to run through the largely shambolic history of the Commissions since their revival in November 2001 by Vice President Dick Cheney and his closest advisor, his legal counsel (and later Chief of Staff), David Addington. I’m delighted to present the interview below, as published on Revolution‘s website, and note that a shorter version of the interview will be in this week’s paper edition of the newspaper.

Revolution Interview with Investigative Journalist Andy Worthington
The Outrage of the Bush-Obama Military Commissions

According to recent news reports, the Obama administration is getting ready to conduct a new series of Military Commissions trials for a number of prisoners being held at the U.S. torture camp at Guantánamo. These Military Commissions, begun under George W. Bush, basically deprive defendants of all rights, and have been part of the whole new level of fascistic repressive measures since 9/11. Revolution talked about the background and the new developments around the Military Commissions with Andy Worthington, 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 U.S.). His website is here.

The Revolution Interview is a special feature of Revolution to acquaint our readers with the views of significant figures in art, theater, music and literature, science, sports and politics. The views expressed by those we interview are, of course, their own, and they are not responsible for the views published elsewhere in our paper.

Revolution: Before we get into the new developments, can you give us some background on the Military Commissions — what they are, their beginnings?

Andy Worthington: What they are is a specific type of military trial that has been used throughout American history. It was most recently used in the Second World War, in the cases of certain Nazi saboteurs. And when the Bush administration was fishing around for new ways to deal with people it had captured, in the early days of the “war on terror,” then it came across the Military Commissions, specifically as they were used in the Second World War. These were established through a “military order,” which was passed with virtually no oversight from anyone, signed by President Bush on November 13, 2001.

The background story to that is that it was essentially hustled through a couple of departments in the White House without anybody really seeing what was going on. Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell later said that he’d not even heard about this, that he saw it on TV. This was essentially the document that established the notion of “enemy combatants” and said these guys can only be tried by Military Commissions, and evidence that would not be permitted in normal courts will be able to be used. I think what was obvious from that document to people who were looking closely was that it was an attempt to set up show trials that would be able to draw on evidence derived from torture and then execute people the administration said were guilty.

It then took quite a while for the administration to be able to put the trials in place. Almost before anything had gotten going, in 2005, a number of prosecutors resigned because they realized this was a bent system. From 2004 to 2006, 10 people were charged. There were various pretrial hearings that were held, but they were all shambolic. Pretty much everything that has ever taken place in a Military Commission hearing as part of the “war on terror” has been shambolic because the rules are so ill-defined, there are so many holes in all the procedures. And this went on until June 2006 when the Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions were illegal. They actually ruled that they contravened the Military Code of Justice and the Geneva Conventions.

So having been thrown out, the Bush administration then went to Congress to revise them. And in that amended form, they have had a second phase of activity. I think it’s quite important to note that at this point, Congress invented war crimes that were tryable by Military Commission. So although the initial idea of having Military Commissions for alleged terror suspects came from Dick Cheney and his chief legal advisor, David Addington, when it was revised by Congress, Congress specifically attempted to make war crimes out of crimes that are not recognized as war crimes, such as “murder by an unprivileged belligerent.”

So at the start of 2007 the Military Commissions were back. From then until the end of the Bush administration, they again stumbled on from one disaster to another. Twenty-eight men were put forward for trials by Military Commission, but only three ever went to trial. The first of those cases was David Hicks, the Australian, and a plea deal had been arranged between Dick Cheney and Prime Minister John Howard of Australia. Hicks had been picked up on the radar in Australia — there was a movement around the injustices against him. So there was a deal that was struck that was supposed to help get John Howard reelected. It failed. But Hicks was “encouraged” to file for a plea deal, whereby he spent another six months in prison back in Australia, in exchange for admitting to “material support for terrorism” — which is one of the key ingredients in federal court terrorism prosecutions, but is one of the invented “war crimes.” It’s not traditionally been viewed as a war crime.

The second case in the summer of 2007 was Salim Hamdan, who was one of a number of drivers who worked for Osama bin Laden, a Yemeni who had taken the job for money. The military jury in his case threw out the conspiracy charge, correctly understanding that one of the many guys who drove bin Laden around wasn’t privy to any secrets, although they did find him guilty of “material support for terrorism.” The jury gave him a five and a half year sentence but the judge back-dated that to the time of his capture. He was a free man five months after that.

The only other case under Bush — the week before the presidential election in November 2008 — was Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a Yemeni who had made a propaganda video for al-Qaida, which he admitted to. Al-Bahlul refused to take part in the process at all. As a result he was not represented legally, because lawyers are not allowed to represent an unwilling client, and even though the military was pushing his lawyer to do so, he refused to take part. So they had a trial for a week, which was a completely one-sided trial because he refused to mount a defense at all. And at the end of that, almost on the eve of the presidential elections, he was found guilty and sentenced to life — in Guantánamo, which he is serving. So that is the background under Bush.

Revolution: Stepping back a little, looking at the Military Commissions under Bush, wasn’t this a significant departure from the legal “norms” in the U.S.? In the history of the U.S., there have been many instances of politically motivated cases and injustices, especially involving people who those in power see as threats, or oppressed people on a daily basis. But still, the Military Commissions represented a major leap in repressive measures — in throwing out basic rights, allowing torture, and so on.

Andy Worthington: Well when they were brought back by Congress, there was an attempt by Congress to say that the use of torture wouldn’t be allowed. The fundamental problem with the Military Commissions is that terrorism is a crime, but the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration, were trying to prosecute people in military settings for crimes, which they were trying to turn into war crimes. And that’s the fundamental misconception about the whole thing, why it doesn’t fit together.

Revolution: Barack Obama campaigned with pledges to shut Guantánamo down and stop the Military Commissions, among other promises. So what has happened under Obama?

Andy Worthington: He suspended the Military Commissions on his first day in office in order to review them, and on his second day in office he also issued executive orders that promised to close Guantánamo within a year, upheld the absolute ban on torture, and promised humane interrogations of detainees in the future. However, in May 2009, he delivered a major national security speech at the National Archives, where he put Military Commissions back on the table. He also put the indefinite detention without charge or trial of some prisoners back on the table as well. And all the dreams and hopes that he was going to either charge or release prisoners, and if charged, try them in federal courts began to unravel at that point. So that’s a simple answer, that on May 2009 he was told, or persuaded to change his mind.

Revolution: So what about these recent reports that Obama is planning to ramp up the Military Commissions again?

Andy Worthington: What’s happened under President Obama is that very little was happening for the first 18 months — there were hearings still going on, but the plan was that the administration wanted to have both federal court trials and Military Commissions. In May 2009 the administration moved one man from Guantánamo, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, to the U.S. mainland (and he was sentenced to life without parole in federal court last week). However, in November 2009, when U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused in involvement in the 9/11 attacks would be brought to the U.S. mainland to face trial, the backlash against that meant that the administration shelved its plan.

That refusal to follow through on its initial statement meant that it gave Congress time to pass a law prohibiting it, which is what lawmakers did just before Christmas, when they passed legislation preventing President Obama from bringing prisoners to the U.S. mainland to face trial. So Obama’s only option is Military Commissions, but their history, under Obama, has not been better than it was under Bush. Last summer, when I think they had been hoping that federal courts and Military Commissions would be coexisting, they reached the trial phase of Ibrahim al-Qosi, another peripheral figure in the al-Qaida picture, really, a man who from what I can see sometimes was a cook in a compound that was sometimes used by Osama bin Laden. So, you know, pretty tangential to everything. When the administration was faced with the prospect of actually going ahead with a trial, it pushed for a plea deal instead. We don’t officially know how long he’s going to serve but the rumor is that he’ll serve two more years and then go back to Sudan.

And in autumn there was the trial of Omar Khadr, the former child prisoner from Canada, who also accepted a plea deal. And he’s apparently serving eight years, one more year in Guantánamo and seven in Canada. That was a total disgrace because he was a child when he was captured after a battle in Afghanistan.

Revolution: He was also tortured in Bagram prison in Afghanistan and threatened with rape…

Andy Worthington: Absolutely. Was tortured. Was never treated as a juvenile prisoner should be treated according to the UN Convention on the rights of a child in war time—which the U.S. signed after his capture, signed in January 2003, and which require the rehabilitation rather than punishment of juveniles who are under 18 when the alleged crime took place. Plus Khadr had to confess to invented war crimes, that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent” who was not allowed to be in a combat situation with U.S. forces. It was “illegal” for him to do so. That’s just a complete disgrace. But, unperturbed [laughs] the administration has now announced — it hasn’t been officially announced, but it has been indicated that they’re revving up to hold more trials by Military Commission at Guantánamo. There are four guys we’ve been told about, who are likely the ones who are going to be put on trial.

Revolution: One of them is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and it has been openly acknowledged that he is one of the detainees that the U.S. tortured with waterboarding. And one of the outrageous things about the Military Commissions is that so-called evidence obtained under torture and hearsay evidence can be used against the defendant, who has no way of challenging them.

Andy Worthington: Yeah, absolutely. And the administration has tried to fudge this. When in November 2009 Holder announced the apparently imminent prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men, he also said that the Military Commissions are officially back, and here are five guys that we’re going to put on trial, and he tried to distinguish between the two systems by saying Military Commissions are more connected with activities that took place in the military context, claiming that, in al-Nashiri’s case, which allegedly involved the attack on the USS Cole [in 2000], was a military target, whereas they were saying 9/11 was a civilian target. I don’t think that really stands up to scrutiny because as you’ve indicated, what lies behind this are issues of evidence. And what they’ve actually done is decide what they think they can get away with in whatever forum. And it’s part of the reason that, the more confident they are, then they’ll go for a federal court trial, where torture evidence is definitely excluded, and hearsay evidence isn’t going to wash. They’ve got more leeway in the Military Commissions.

And of course, beyond the federal courts and the Military Commissions, there is a third category of people — those they want to hold indefinitely without charge or trial, because they have said: we think these people are too dangerous, but we don’t even have the evidence that would stand up in a Military Commission — i.e., they really don’t have anything resembling evidence at all. So it would all have to be hearsay. And yes, it’s troubling that they rely on hearsay because it’s so much tied in with the torture program, essentially. Not just the “high-value detainee” program and extraordinary renditions and CIA secret prisons where torture was clearly central, but the fact is that torture permeates so much of the way in which the men were held and interrogated in Afghanistan before they went to Guantánamo. So in Kandahar and primarily in Bagram, as in Guantánamo itself, where there was a regime in place, certainly for two years, that was a version of the torture program that had been used by the CIA in their secret prisons. It didn’t involve waterboarding, but it did involve torture.

Revolution: How many prisoners are there currently at Guantánamo, and what are their conditions of imprisonment?

Andy Worthington: There are 173 men being held at Guantánamo. In general, conditions improved under Obama. This doesn’t apply to all of them. There are still some men held in solitary. In general though, they have been allowed to mingle more and to have some recreational facilities. Although recently we’ve heard from prisoners, who have unclassified phone calls with their lawyers, that there’s something going on there, that they’re actually moving people back into spending more time in isolation. But there has been in general an improvement, which I think has indicated that they’re in it for the long haul.

After all, Guantánamo’s purpose as an interrogation center is long gone. That was the whole point, really, about what the Bush administration wanted, was to hold people outside the law, so that it could do whatever it wanted to do to them, to get what it described as “actionable intelligence.” It wasn’t concerned with what the hell it was going to do with these people, and it wasn’t concerned with prosecution. It was about intelligence. And sadly what happened was that when people didn’t tell them what they thought they should be telling them, whether that was because they were withholding it or they were completely wrong people, then they introduced torture, having fooled themselves into thinking that torture was going to be a good way of getting the truth. But it doesn’t necessarily get you anything even resembling the truth, or you can’t separate the truth from fiction. You end up accusing someone falsely, kicking so many doors down in the middle of the night, and dragging off to dungeons other people whose name was divulged because someone’s been tortured, not because they did anything. That web of where torture leads is absolutely horrible.

Revolution: There are still U.S. prisons, in Afghanistan for example, where people are still being held in conditions of torture…

Andy Worthington: There’s the prison in Bagram. There are persistent stories of a secret prison that is part of Bagram. And I think it’s very credible that, although there has been in general an effort to learn from a lot of the mistakes of the Bush administration, operationally there are certainly people who find it useful to have some leeway in how people can be treated. And I think more fundamentally the problem that is demonstrated by Afghanistan is that Bagram, which is the main prison for the ongoing U.S. operations in Afghanistan, is not a place that has been returned to the rule of the Geneva Conventions. It’s a place where people are held for a significant amount of time without any adequate screening to determine whether they should be there and then are given a review which actually resembles the review process at Guantánamo, which the Supreme Court found inadequate in 2008. The military is not operating according to the Geneva Conventions. That’s the kind of major change that happened, I think, that hasn’t been addressed.

The more disturbing aspect is that around the edges of this amended military detention scenario are people that are kept off the books for a while completely so that they can be leaned on a bit. We’re dealing definitely with torture. All the stories demonstrate that we’re dealing with torture. The magic word for most people with torture is: were they waterboarded. Well that’s not the issue here, really. It’s people that have been subjected to prolonged solitary confinement and sleep deprivation, for example. That’s a form of torture.

Revolution: Are there any other points about these reports of new Military Commission hearings we should be aware of?

Andy Worthington: What we know is that the administration initiated a Task Force when Obama came into office. They spent a year going through all the Guantánamo cases, deciding what to do with them. This involved officials and lawyers from government departments and agencies — I describe them as pretty sober set of career officials — who carefully went through what information they could about the men held to decide what should be done with them. Now I have a problem with that because there’s already a legal process underway, which is their habeas corpus decisions. President Obama had set up essentially a kind of executive parallel review process. So I have a problem with that anyway, but this is their basis for deciding what to do with the men held.

And they said, of the 173 men held — and bear in mind three of the ones are held because of the results of their Military Commissions — they want to put 33 men on trial, they want to hold 48 indefinitely without charge or trial, and the rest ought to be released. And so clearly, there’s a big problem — 89 men recommended for release who are still held. Another big problem — 48 men held indefinitely without charge or trial because any evidence against them you can’t use, so it’s not evidence. And that’s a fundamental problem. Thirty-three men are supposed to be put on trial. So are they going to give up on holding federal court trials? Are they possibly going to, as has been suggested, use Justice Department funds to bypass Congressional ban on bringing prisoners to the U.S. mainland using the Defense budget and put them on trial?

The trial of Ghailani, which resulted in a jury convicting him of only one count out of 285, was portrayed by the supporters of the Military Commissions as a failure. I mean, if you had not been paying attention, you could think that the man was acquitted. He wasn’t. That one charge carried a maximum of life without parole. And last week the judge sentenced him to life without parole. That also proved to Obama’s critics that the federal courts are a safe venue for prosecuting terrorists. I think it’s easy to say that actually it also demonstrated federal court trials are too successful because they deliver punitive sentences. Because if you survey the whole landscape of terrorism-related offenses prosecuted in federal courts, there are very, very worrying sentences being handed down for people doing virtually nothing, receiving enormous sentences.

But if they want to proceed with these trials, of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, and the four other men in a venue that will be internationally recognized, if they want to attempt to draw a line under the whole of this “war on terror,” which started because of 9/11, and here are the guys who are supposed to have done the whole thing — are they going to do that? Or are they going to accept that, no it’s too unpopular to do that, just leave them in Guantánamo, and we’ll start picking away at people, one by one, and put them on trial in Military Commissions and see if that works? I don’t quite know which course of action they’re going to take. But first of all they’re going to have to get through the trials of the men they’ve put forward.

We’ve spoken about al-Nashiri. But another of the three other men they’ve put forward — Ahmed al-Darbi, picked up in Azerbaijan — seems also to have a history that’s replete with torture, particularly in Bagram, probably in the secret part of Bagram that was running under the Bush administration. One of them, to me, is completely pointless — a minor insurgent, if anything, in Afghanistan, an Afghan named Obaidullah. What on earth is going on here, with an attempt to prosecute him? We’ll have to see how it goes. My feeling is that they will carry on trying to secure plea deals in these Military Commission trials, as it’s the only venue where they can do trials at all at the moment. And it may be that, if you look on average at how the Commissions have worked out, they’re actually working out better for the prisoners in terms of getting out of Guantánamo than any other way.

Revolution: Aside from the individual cases of these prisoners, there is the overall moral and legal implications of the continuing existence of Guantánamo, of indefinite detentions, and so on.

Andy Worthington: I don’t know how it’s possible to shift the discussion to where it should be. But all of this, whatever Obama has tried to do the last few years, has really failed to shift the structure of detention, from what was so falsely established by the Bush administration. This is a new kind of thing in history. We’re not dealing with soldiers. We’re not dealing with criminals. We’re dealing with a new category of human beings who don’t deserve to have any rights, the “enemy combatants.” Now Obama dropped that terminology. But when they want to put the people in Guantánamo on trial in Military Commissions as we saw with Omar Khadr, they have to be declared by a judge to be “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents,” which they think is more in spirit with the Geneva Conventions. But again, it’s a legacy of this fundamental problem that hasn’t been addressed, which is, there is not a third category of prisoner, there are only two types of people that you hold. They are either criminal suspects and you put them on trial — speedily, I believe, is an important aspect of that — or they’re prisoners of war, they’re soldiers who you’ve captured in wartime, whether they’re wearing a regular uniform or not, and that’s it.

There’s an enormous resistance to going back to the world that existed before 9/11 in that sense. The Bush position is ferociously defended by numerous Republicans now. But it’s also essentially, fundamentally defended by the Obama administration as well, however much they may try to dance around that — and if challenged, they would probably talk about how this isn’t about projecting into the future, this is a legacy problem they’re trying to deal with, and under the terms of this legacy problem, that detention situation exists. They could redefine people as prisoners of war protected by the Geneva Convention. Then we could all be debating about how long the war lasts and how long it’s appropriate to hold these men.

So it’s a disastrous confusion, really, the position we’re in now, with all these different factions fighting their own corners, and the people in Guantánamo ultimately being the losers. If they’re cleared for release, they’re not going anywhere. If they were recommended to be put forward for trial, then one avenue for trial has been cut off, the other one doesn’t look promising. Then behind that are men to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, which was exactly what the Bush administration intended in the first place. And however that’s dressed up, that’s not fundamentally any different either.

I hope that at some point we will be able to push the debate onto these issues of scrapping the whole terminology that underpins detentions in the “war on terror” and get back to an understanding that people are either criminals or soldiers, and that’s the end of the story.

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, 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.