Archive for May, 2016

Print off a poster here, take a photo with it, like former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, and send it to us!

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

Next Saturday, May 14, is the next milestone in the Countdown to Close Guantánamo that we launched in January, to count down the last year of the Obama presidency, and to remind President Obama of his promise to close the prison before he leaves office, which he first made on his second day in office in January 2009.

Launched on January 20 with exactly one year to go — by Close Guantánamo co-founder Andy Worthington and music legend Roger Waters on Democracy Now! — the countdown has continued with posters every 50 days. 350 days was on February 4, and 300 days was on March 25, and we’re now asking you for your photos for next Saturday, May 14, marking 250 days to go.

Over 300 supporters from across the US and around the world — including some celebrities — have so far sent in photos, which can be seen here and here, and we are delighted to invite you to join them. Shown above is former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, who I photographed at a Parliamentary briefing last month about the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo prisoner and best-selling author, whose memoir, Guantánamo Diary, written in the prison, was published last year to widespread acclaim. See here for the campaign to free Slahi. Read the rest of this entry »

Good news for a change, as the Tories definitively lose control of London (OK, I’m slightly jumping the gun, but the Guardian is reporting that “Sadiq Khan ‘has won’ London mayoral race,” and Jeremy Corbyn has already sent Khan his congratulations). The Tories, who were already down in terms of MPs after last year’s General Election (when 45 of the capital’s 73 Parliamentary seats went to Labour), have now lost the Mayor, with Labour’s Sadiq Khan soundly beating Zac Goldsmith, and in the capital-wide elections for members of the Greater London Assembly, with 14 of the 25 seats counted, Labour had nine seats (a gain of one), and the Tories had five (a loss of one). The BBC reported that 43% of Londoners had voted Labour, 31% had voted Tory, and the Green Party had come third.

This is good news for Sadiq Khan, of course, but also for Jeremy Corbyn, in his first electoral test as Labour Party leader, and for the Labour Party as a whole the results are a vindication of his leadership — especially satisfying after the artificial anti-Semitism row that Labour right-wingers and a throughly unprincipled mainstream media were all too delighted to promote. At the time of writing Labour had held almost all its council seats across England, and had also held 29 seats in Wales (just short of a majority). The only dimmed light is in Scotland, where the SNP continues to replace them as the party of the left — and where, shockingly, the Tories pushed them into third place.

In London, of course, the Tories persistently shot themselves in the foot. Zac Goldsmith failed to connect with people and looked like he didn’t want the job — and it’s interesting to see how people aren’t fooled by a lack of desire for the job. However, his woes multiplied in the last few weeks when he hired the black propagandist Lynton Crosby, the Australian who has been behind the Tories’ relentlessly black propaganda for the last six years, which, it is important to note, is single-handedly responsible for the horrendous increase in the petty hatreds that have come to typify modern Britain — dominated, in particular, by racism, but also targeting anyone vulnerable, as can be seen by the government’s relentless assault on the unemployed and the disabled. Read the rest of this entry »

Please sign and share the petition, calling for David Cameron to apologise to Suliman Gani, which currently has over 1,100 signatures.

Yesterday evening, friends of Suliman Gani launched a petition on Change.org, urging Prime Minister David Cameron to retract allegations he made two weeks ago about Muslim community organiser Suliman Gani. At Prime Minister’s Questions, David Cameron called him a supporter of Islamic State (IS), when nothing could be further from the truth. Mr Gani has, in fact, appeared at an event called ‘The Evils of Isis’, at which he condemned their actions, and has repeatedly explained how their actions are un-Islamic.

The Prime Minister’s false allegations were part of an effort to undermine Sadiq Khan prior to today’s London Mayoral elections, which also involved Zac Goldsmith, who called Mr. Gani “one of the most repellent figures in this country”, while failing to remember that he had a photo taken with Mr. Gani at an event last year, and also failing to recognise that Mr. Gani has long expressed support for and interest in the Conservative Party.

Today, as Londoners go to the polls to vote for the capital’s next Mayor, please sign and share the petition, and please vote wisely. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, two more Periodic Review Boards took place for men held in the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The PRBs, which began in November 2013, are reviewing the cases of all the men still held who are not facing trials or were not already approved for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009.

The PRBs that took place last week were for the 32nd and 33rd prisoners to have their cases considered. Of the previous 31, 20 have so far been approved for release, eight have had their ongoing imprisonment recommended, and three are awaiting results. Of the decisions taken, the prisoners’ success rate is 71%, a figure that is a stern rebuke to the task force, which either described them as “too dangerous to release,” while conceding that there was insufficient evidence to put them on trial, meaning that there are serious problems with the so-called “evidence,” or recommended them for prosecution in a system — the military commissions — that is so discredited that, after the task force made its recommendations, appeals court judges began overturning some of the few convictions achieved in the commissions, on the basis that the war crimes for which the prisoners had been convicted were not legitimate war crimes at all but had been invented by Congress.

Most of the PRBs to date have been for the “forever prisoners,” those mistakenly described as “too dangerous to release,” and last week’s PRBs were for two more from this group. Read the rest of this entry »

In a hugely significant court ruling on April 22, US District Court Senior Judge Justin Quackenbush, in Spokane, Washington State, allowed a lawsuit to proceed against James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, the psychologists who designed and implemented the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program. Both men had worked for the military’s SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which trains US personnel to resist torture, if captured by a hostile enemy, by subjecting them to torture techniques to prepare them to resist.

The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), on behalf of three victims of the torture program — Gul Rahman, who died, and Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, who are both still alive.

As the ACLU described it, when Judge Quackenbush announced his ruling from the bench, he “gave attorneys in the case 30 days to come up with a plan for discovery, a first in a lawsuit concerning CIA torture.” Read the rest of this entry »