Closing Guantanamo

Last week, I was in Washington D.C., attending events to mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as part of a 12-day US tour organized by some of my great friends in the US — the activists of The World Can’t Wait, and their national director Debra Sweet, [...]

See the entire event on C-SPAN here (and also via UStream below, from the website of the New America Foundation, where it was later replaced by a YouTube version, made available at the foot of this article). On the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Bush administration’s prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which belonged [...]

Yesterday, at “Guantánamo Forever?” an event at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C., attorney Tom Wilner and journalist Andy Worthington launched “Close Guantánamo,” a new campaign and website designed to provide education about the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo, to provide a focus for those who believe that the prison must be closed, and to [...]

Today, prisoners at Guantánamo will embark on a peaceful protest, involving sit-ins and hunger strikes, to protest about their continued detention, and the continued existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, three years after President Obama came to office promising to close it within a year, and to show their appreciation of the protests [...]

January 11, 2012 is a profoundly depressing anniversary — marking ten years since the Bush administration established its “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and decided that those who ended up in US custody would not be screened to ascertain whether or not they were combatants, and would be sent to Guantánamo to [...]

January 11, 2012 is the 10th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, and, to mark this bleak anniversary, dozens of campaigning groups are staging en event, “10 Years Too Many: National Day of Action Against Guantánamo.” Click on the image to enlarge. Beginning at 12 noon outside the White [...]

Last week, when the Senate voted, by 93 votes to 7, to pass the latest National Defense Authorization Act (PDF), they passed legislation that not only approved a budget of $662 billion in military spending for the next fiscal year, but also demanded mandatory military custody for all terror suspects seized in future. The military [...]

A year and a half ago, two Facebook friends, Shahrina J. Ahmed and Mahfuja Bint Ammu, drew on my research about Guantánamo for a letter-writing campaign, in which they asked their friends and others on Facebook to volunteer to write to each of the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo. Shahrina announced the letter-writing campaign via a [...]

Yesterday the shameful dinosaurs of the Senate — hopelessly out of touch with reality, for the most part, and haunted by specters of their own making — approved, by 93 votes to 7, the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (PDF), which contains a number of astonishingly alarming provisions — Sections 1031 and 1032, [...]

Last week, the exorbitant expense of maintaining the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo was revealed in the Miami Herald, where Carol Rosenberg explained that Congress provided $139 million to operate the prison last year, which, with 171 prisoners still held, works out at $812,865 per prisoner, nearly 30 times as much as [...]