Guantanamo

Some good news for a change, as a US judge orders the release from jail of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who has been imprisoned for a year for refusing to cooperate with a Grand Jury investigation into WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. The judge, however, refused to waive the $256,000 that Manning was charged for refusing to cooperate with the investigation. I also draw parallels with the ongoing efforts in the UK to extradite Assange to the US to face espionage charges relating to WikiLeaks’ publication of the documents leaked by Manning.

In a historic US court ruling, District Judge Rosemary Collyer has ordered the US government to allow tortured Guantánamo prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani, who has long-standing and profound mental health issues, to be assessed by “a mixed medical commission,” consisting of a US medical officer, and two doctors from a neutral country chosen by the International Committee of the Red Cross, to determine whether he should be returned to Saudi Arabia for treatment.

Here’s my latest quarterly fundraiser. As an independent journalist and activist, I’m dependent on the support of my readers to enable me to keep writing about Guantánamo, and working to get the prison closed, and also to support my ongoing photo-journalism project ‘The State of London.’ I hope that you can help!

A powerful new article, originally published as a world exclusive on the Close Guantánamo website, by former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, about his friend Khalid Qasim, a talented artist, singer and footballer, who is still held at Guantánamo, despite posing no threat to the US.

My report on today’s great news that the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has approved an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Afghanistan since May 2003 by US armed forces and members of the CIA, the Taliban and affiliated armed groups, and Afghan government forces, reversing a decision last year not to proceed with the investigation, which was widely perceived to have come about in response to pressure exerted by the Trump administration. Interestingly, although the US is not a party to the ICC Statute, the Court has jurisdiction over crimes committed by US actors in the territories of other State Parties to the ICC, and the investigation is, therefore, also empowered to look at crimes committed since July 2002 outside Afghanistan – at, for example, “black sites” in Poland, Romania and Lithuania.

A second article about the launch of – and significance of – “Guantánamo [Un]Censored: Art from Inside the Prison,” an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ artwork at CUNY School of Law in New York.

My report about a powerful new exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ artwork that has just opened at CUNY School of Law in New York, featuring the work of eleven current and former prisoners, including Khalid Qasim, whose work I saw at a earlier version of the exhibition last month, during my annual US trip to call for the closure of the prison on the anniversary of its opening.

With one week to go until the start of the US extradition hearing for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, I urge the mainstream media to get more involved, drawing on a recent Guardian article by journalist and academic Roy Greenslade, in which he called on newspaper editors to speak out against the proposed extradition as an urgent and necessary defence of press freedom.

My report on the good news that three Afghan nationals and former Guantánamo prisoners, who were sent to the UAE in 2016-17, have been repatriated following a peace agreement negotiated between the Afghan government and former warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hesb-e Islami movement in 2016.

Here’s the video of the panel discussion about Guantánamo that I undertook at the New America think-tank in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 13, with the attorney Tom Wilner. I co-founded the “Close Guantánamo” campaign with Tom in 2012, and we’re grateful that New America has been hosting panel discussions about Guantánamo every year for many years. This year there was a real urgency and anger to our call for the prison to be closed, brought about by three years of Donald Trump effectively sealing the prison shut, even though holding people indefinitely without charge or trial is profoundly unacceptable.