Archive for July, 2011

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Freelance investigative journalist Andy Worthington continues his 70-part, million-word series telling, for the first time, the stories of 776 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002. Adding information released by WikiLeaks in April 2011 to the existing documentation about the prisoners, much of which was already covered in Andy’s book The Guantánamo Files and in the archive of articles on his website, the project will be completed in time for the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening on January 11, 2012.

This is Part 7 of the 70-part series.

In late April, WikiLeaks released its latest treasure trove of classified US documents, a set of 765 Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) from the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Compiled between 2002 and January 2009 by the Joint Task Force that has primary responsibility for the detention and interrogation of the prisoners, these detailed military assessments therefore provided new information relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba throughout its long and inglorious history, including, for the first time, information about 84 of the first 201 prisoners released, which had never been made available before.

Superficially, the Detainee Assessment Briefs appear to contain allegations against numerous prisoners which purport to prove how dangerous they are or were, but in reality the majority of these statements were made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners, in Kandahar or Bagram in Afghanistan prior to their arrival at Guantánamo, in Guantánamo itself, or in the CIA’s secret prisons, and in all three environments, torture and abuse were rife.

I ran through some of the dubious witnesses responsible for so many of the claims against the prisoners in the introduction to Part One of this new series, and, while this is of enormous importance in the cases of many of the men still held (and also in the cases of some of those released), it is not particularly relevant to the overwhelmingly insignificant prisoners released between 2002 and September 2004, whose detention was so pointless that the authorities didn’t even bother trying to build cases against them through the testimony of their fellow prisoners. Read the rest of this entry »

In the US media, there’s a little bit of a buzz right now about the use of torture by the Bush administration, and much of it is the right sort of buzz — openly involving reminders that torture is a crime, and that, in addition, using torture is worthless if the aim is to produce reliable information. Also mentioned, though not, in general, with the prominence it truly deserves, is the fact that those who authorized the use of torture still walk free, and are allowed to publish books and appear on chat shows, even if their opportunities for foreign travel are severely curtailed, as with George W. Bush, because the world is full of countries in which the appropriate respect is given to the UN Convention Against Torture — to which, of course, the US, under Ronald Reagan, became a signatory.

The buzz about torture has been created because of the publication of a book entitled, The Interrogator: An Education by Glenn L. Carle, a former CIA operative and Arabic speaker who was sent to an undisclosed country, to a “black site” known as Hotel California, to interrogate a suspected senior al-Qaeda operative.

Carle’s book s important for two reasons: firstly, because it is the first example of a US interrogator’s first-hand account of a “black site,” and secondly, and crucially, because Carle refused to engage in the torture techniques that the Bush administration arranged for lawyers in the Justice Department to authorize, preferring instead to interrogate the prisoner using rapport-buiiding methods and psychological insight, and also because he is openly critical of those methods. Read the rest of this entry »

Britain’s incompetent coalition government has just hit a new low. In a leaked letter to David Cameron from the office of Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the ruinous impact of the government’s decision to cap benefits at £500 a week per family (essentially capping housing benefit at £400 a week) is exposed. Pickles, via his private secretary Nico Heslop, told the Prime Minister in no uncertain terms that 40,000 families will be made homeless by the government’s savage welfare reforms, and that the estimated £270m saving from the benefits cap “will be wiped out by the need to divert resources to help the newly homeless and is likely to ‘generate a net cost,’” as the Guardian explained.

The limit on housing benefit was a key plank of Cameron’s manipulation of the electorate last year, with the unemployed portrayed as workshy scroungers, and housing benefit portrayed as something that is a result of their greed, rather than of  landlords setting rents that are either unnecessarily high or an unfortunate response to an overheated property market. The proposals alarmed those involved in housing and welfare, although in polls the public decided to support Cameron and his vile politics of envy, in which he pushed the notion that it was unacceptable for the unemployed to live in houses that those in work were unable to afford.

I lamented all of these developments in my articles last year, Critics Attack UK Government’s Cruel and Ill-Conceived Assault on Welfare and On Housing Benefit Cuts, British Public Reveals Shocking Lack of Empathy and Compassion, in which I also noted that, according to independent research commissioned by Shelter from the Cambridge Centre for Housing & Planning Research at the University of Cambridge, an estimated 134,000 households “will either be evicted or forced to move when the cuts come in next year as they will be unable to negotiate cheaper rents.” Read the rest of this entry »

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For over five years, I have been researching and writing about Guantánamo and the 779 men (and boys) held there over the last nine and a half years, first through my book The Guantánamo Files, and, since May 2007, as a full-time independent investigative journalist. For nearly three years, I focused on the crimes of the Bush administration and, since January 2009, I have turned my attention to the failures of the Obama administration to thoroughly repudiate those crimes and to hold anyone accountable for them, and, increasingly, on President Obama’s failure to charge or release prisoners, and to show any sign that Guantánamo will eventually be closed.

My intention, all along, has been to bring the men to life through their stories, dispelling the Bush administration’s rhetoric about the prison holding “the worst of the worst,” and demonstrating how, instead, the majority of the prisoners were either innocent men, seized by the US military’s allies at a time when bounty payments were widespread, or recruits for the Taliban, who had been encouraged by supporters in their homelands to help the Taliban in a long-running inter-Muslim civil war (with the Northern Alliance), which began long before the 9/11 attacks and, for the most part, had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism. As I explained in the introduction to my four-part Definitive Prisoner List (updated on June 1 this year), I remain convinced, through detailed research, through comments from insiders with knowledge of Guantánamo, and, most recently, through an analysis of classified military documents released by WikiLeaks, that “at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total” had no involvement with terrorism. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been interested in the work of the German artist Christoph Faulhaber since 2009, when I first heard about a project he had initiated in Hamburg. Entitled, “Guantánamo Allocation Center,” it involved creating a site for a proposed relocation center for Guantánamo prisoners who cannot be repatriated because they face the risk of torture in their home countries, in order to “foster [a] public dialogue on the issue of accepting former inmates from Guantánamo” (click on the photo to enlarge).

As Faulhaber explained in an interview, the site was in “the HafenCity, the former Free Port, [which] was until recently a border region. In other words, here, in what was, and still is, the city’s face to the world, the legal situation was different. And that’s the issue with the question of what to do with the remaining prisoners too.” Crucially, as Faulhaber also explained, “These people are not only beyond the reach of international jurisdiction, they have also been expatriated, they can’t go back or anywhere else. They are the first global outlaws in history.” Read the rest of this entry »

So I was on the streets of London yesterday, after joining my wife, my son and three of his friends, whose school was closed for the day, as well as other friends and teachers from my son’s school (who even had a banner!) on a march from Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Methodist Central Hall, via the Strand and Whitehall. It was a lovely sunny day, and the children looked wonderful, blowing whistles, plastered with National Union of Teachers (NUT) stickers, wearing T-shirts provided by the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), and also waving flags from the University and College Union (UCU) and Lewisham People Before Profit. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of public sector workers were on strike, from the three unions above, plus the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), whose members were on a national strike for the first time since 1979, and the march and rally in London was attended by at least 30,00 people.

This was something of a family affair for me, as my wife is a UCU member, some of our very good friends are teachers, and, of course, we know other university lecturers and have, over the last seven years that my son has been at primary and junior school, got to know all his teachers. However, I would have been there in solidarity even if the strike had not involved anyone I knew, for two reasons: firstly, because the argument about pensions is actually part of an ideological struggle between the government and the unions, in which the government, to be blunt, is not to be trusted; and secondly, because yesterday’s strike actions were part of a wider desire for protests against the government — for their arrogance, their incompetence, and the savage reach of their entire programme for wrecking the state and privatising whatever hasn’t already been privatised under Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, as I have been explaining since October in my series of articles under the heading, Battle for Britain: Fighting the Coalition Government’s Vile Ideology. Read the rest of this entry »