Archive for April, 2018

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Last week, I published an article, Betrayal: Senegal Prepares to Send Two Former Guantánamo Prisoners Back to Libya, Where They Face Imprisonment, Torture and Even Execution, looking at the terrible news that two Libyan nationals were being threatened with deportation to Libya. The two men, Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr (aka Omar Mohammed Khalifh) and Salem Gherebi (aka Ghereby), were given humanitarian asylum in Senegal two years ago, on the understanding, agreed with the US State Department, that it was permanent, and that they would not, under any circumstances, be returned to Libya, where the security situation was so fraught that it was not possible to guarantee their safety as former Guantánamo prisoners tainted, unfairly, with the stamp of terrorism.

When I published my article, the Senegalese government’s threat was to send the two men back to Libya on April 3, and there were hopes that criticism might stop the plans from going ahead. However, on April 4, the Guantánamo Justice Centre, set up by former prisoners, posted the following update: “Regarding the situation of Omar and Salem previously given refuge in Senegal, we regret to report that eye witnesses have said one of the Guantánamo survivors was transferred today to Tripoli Mitiga Airport.”

On April 5, the New York Times picked up the story. On the ground in Senegal, Dionne Searcey confirmed that Khalifa had “disappeared from his once-guarded apartment in Dakar that now appears abandoned.” The Times added that the Senegalese government had said that Khalifa, identified as Awad Khalifa, “was not being deported.” However, neighbors said Khalifa and Salem Ghereby “were taken away on Tuesday afternoon.” The Times also explained that, hours earlier, “they had told a New York Times reporter visiting the apartment” — Dionne Searcey, presumably — “that they had received handwritten notices that they would be sent to Libya.” Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Last week, I was delighted to talk to Linda Olson-Osterlund for the morning show, Political Perspectives, on KBOO FM, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon. Linda has been talking to me about Guantánamo for many years, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to her. 

The show is available here — and here as an MP3 — and I hope you have time to listen to it, and will share it if you find it useful. Unfortunately, KBOO had a new telephone system, which didn’t allow foreign calls, and so the first 12 minutes of the show feature some music by Bill Frissell, before Linda introduced me at 12:20, prior to our interview beginning at 15:00.

Linda and I spent the first ten minutes talking about the habeas corpus petition submitted by lawyers for eleven of the remaining 41 prisoners at Guantánamo on January 11, the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison. As I explained in a recent article, the lawyers argued, as a press release by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights put it, that “[Donald] Trump’s proclamation against releasing anyone from Guantánamo, regardless of their circumstances, which has borne out for the first full year of the Trump presidency, is arbitrary and unlawful and amounts to ‘perpetual detention for detention’s sake.’” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been some time since I last posted about the activities of my band The Four Fathers, so here’s an update following our most recent appearances — at a protest against the proposed redevelopment of Walthamstow’s main square, on February 24, and as part of the Telegraph Hill Festival, with our friends the Commie Faggots, on March 16, a wonderful and very well attended protest music double bill.

Since I last wrote about the band, people have, we’re glad to note, continued to listen to us on Bandcamp (and we’ve even sold a few CDs!), and our video of ‘Grenfell’, the song I wrote after last June’s entirely preventable fire in west London, in which over 70 people died, has now had nearly 1,650 views on YouTube and Facebook.

We’re planning to record it soon, along with our anti-Brexit anthem, ‘I Want My Country Back (From the People Who Wanted Their Country Back)’, and we’ve also been working on new material — new songs about the history of the counter-culture, and about so-called “affordable” housing, and a positive anthem about solidarity and resistance — and some covers, with Aswad’s ‘Not Satisfied’ inching closer to a public outing. I was also recently interviewed for an article about protest music in Artefact Magazine, produced by students at London College of Communications, following up on another protest music interview, for the Icelandic website, Shouts! Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months of the Trump administration.

Dreadful news from Senegal, where two former Guantánamo prisoners, both from Libya, have been told that their resettlement in the country in April 2016, which they had been led to believe was permanent, is to be brought to a sudden end tomorrow, with their unwilling — and potentially fatal — repatriation to Libya.

For the Intercept, Murtaza Hussain and Glenn Greenwald reported the story on Saturday night, focusing on the story of one of the men, Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr (aka Omar Mohammed Khalifh), whose release in Senegal was “the by-product of a deal negotiated by his attorneys with the U.S. government.” His lawyer, Ramzi Kassem, a professor at CUNY School of Law in New York, told the Intercept that the agreement “expressly guaranteed that the Libyan would have the right to permanently settle in Senegal and rebuild his life there, rather than be returned to war-torn Libya.”

As the Intercept explained, “In addition to the deteriorating security situation in his home country, Khalifa’s status as a former Guantánamo detainee as well as his tribal background meant that being sent back to his country of origin would mean an almost certain death sentence.” Read the rest of this entry »