As I have been explaining since the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo a year ago, it is now appropriate to regard most of, if not all of the remaining 171 prisoners as political prisoners, given that the Obama administration, Congress and the judiciary have all made sure that Guantánamo may never close, and that few, if any of the remaining prisoners will ever be released, even though 89 of them were cleared for release (or, technically, “approved for transfer”) by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established in January 2009.

The situation is no better for the other 82 prisoners, who are either scheduled to face trials that, in most cases, show no signs of materializing, or, in 46 cases, have been specifically designated as prisoners to be held indefinitely without charge or trial by President Obama, in an executive order last March. Although the President promised periodic reviews for these prisoners, his executive order essentially enshrines the indefensible –  indefinite detention without charge or trial — as an official policy of his administration, even though he and senior officials have been at pains to point out that it applies only to these men, and is not to be construed as lending credibility to indefinite detention in general.

That is a not an entirely convincing argument, of course, but in stepping back and looking at the situation facing all the men still held, it is, I believe, appropriate to focus not only on the injustice specifically facing these 46 men, but, as I mentioned above, to describe all the remaining detainees as political prisoners, because it makes no difference whether they have been cleared or not, as it ends up with the same result — indefinite detention, with no end in sight.

While the stories of the British ex-prisoners — eight of whom came to the Observer‘s offices to be interviewed, and to take part in a photoshoot — are fascinating, as they recall their horrendous experiences in US custody, and their struggles to rebuild their lives, it is Shaker Aamer, the charismatic, eloquent activist for the prisoners’ rights, who hovers over the proceedings, and it is Shaker, of course, who, like the 170 other men still held at Guantánamo, can now be regarded as a political prisoner, unlikely to be freed even though the Obama administration cleared him for release, and even though the British government has asked for him to be returned to the UK, where he has a British wife and four children.

Below, I’m cross-posting Tracy McVeigh’s article about the released prisoners, and an additional Observer article about Shaker, in which, sadly, it is revealed that senior White House sources have said that the Obama administration “will not risk releasing Shaker Aamer” before the Presidential election in November, because, as one said, “We’ve taken enough hits from the right; we can’t risk any more.” The article also notes that the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta — and therefore, by extension, the administration as a whole — has been “unwilling” to secure Shaker’s release by overcoming the main obstacle to the release of cleared prisoners — Congressional demands that the defense secretary certifies that any country to which prisoners are to be released is “safe,” and that released prisoners will not be able to “return to the battlefield.”

Given that this involves the UK, America’s staunchest ally in the “war on terror,” it is depressing that the administration is unwilling to tackle Congress, and it is to be hoped, therefore, that there is genuine reason to be encouraged by the Observer also noting that, with regard to the UK, “it is believed that the foreign secretary, William Hague, has called an urgent meeting early in the new year to discuss what more the British government can do to bring Aamer home.”

Securing Shaker’s return is not only a matter of justice, of course; it may also be a matter of life or death, as his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, noted after visiting him in November. In the Independent, Paul Cahalan, who has closely followed Shaker’s case, spoke to his father-in-law, Saeed Siddique, who also raised alarm bells about Shaker’s condition. “In the 10 years Shaker has been there he has become old,” he said. “His hair has turned white and he is very ill. His children are growing now and it is difficult for them. The youngest one is nine and has never met his dad. He doesn’t know why, and he tells his mum, ‘My father doesn’t love me because he never sees me.’” He added, “Since Shaker has gone, my daughter has become very ill. She has been treated for depression and hearing voices. When she is very bad, I have to look after her and the children for weeks. It is very hard for her and all the children. When he was captured, Shaker offered to let my daughter divorce him, but she said, ‘No, I will wait for you.’ She is still waiting.”

Britain’s Guantánamo survivors are suffering a toxic legacy
By Tracy McVeigh, The Observer, January 1, 2012

After years of imprisonment, victims of America’s ‘icon of lawlessness’ were released without charge, but their lives have been shattered.

They call each other “brother” and the warmth between them is tangible. Not close friends as such, they come from different walks of life, cultures and backgrounds, but have been thrown together by a shared experience. They are Britain’s survivors of Guantánamo, the detention centre that has been called the “gulag of our times”.

All were imprisoned, interrogated and held without charge or trial; some allege that they were tortured; all have suffered lasting effects to their mental and physical health.

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the first detainees arriving at Guantánamo Bay detention camps, where the open-mesh and barbed-wire cells became synonymous with the abuse of human rights and the scandal of illegal rendition. The camp was called an “icon of lawlessness” by Amnesty International because inside its high-security fences all conventions of international justice, from the Geneva Convention to access to legal representation, were ignored.

Still in operation despite Barack Obama’s pre- and post-election pledges to close it, Guantánamo now houses 171 prisoners, including the last remaining British resident, Shaker Aamer. In total nine British citizens and six British residents were among the 779 adults and children imprisoned in Guantánamo camps, built on a US naval outpost on the southeastern tip of Cuba to house the “enemy combatants” of George Bush’s war on terror.

All bar Aamer were released back to the UK without charge. All were interviewed by the British authorities on their return and allowed to go back to whatever remained salvageable of their lives and were later awarded out-of-court compensation for their extrajudicial ordeal. Four have had their travel outside the UK restricted.

Any involvement the men may or may not have had with the fighting in Afghanistan or with any terror plots has never been proved. Most, says Guantánamo expert and author Andy Worthington, were “a bunch of nobodies”.

“One tries to stay very objective in taking an overview of Guantánamo, but at the end of the day it’s pretty evident that all but a handful of the people caught up in the trawling approach the Americans took post-9/11 in Afghanistan were not terrorists,” he said.

“Some were hanging out in Afghanistan because it was a cheap place to live or study, some young idealistic men might have gone to training camps to get involved in fighting against the Northern Alliance but, not to be too flippant, it was a bunch of boy scouts with AK47s. A combination of drifters and footsoldiers. The Americans were so busy cranking up the significance of what they were doing and hanging on to people they should have let go, it became a colossal waste of resources.”

On 14 February, 43-year-old Aamer will have spent 10 years in Guantánamo, without charge or trial, and two years after he was cleared for release by the US authorities. The day will be the 10th birthday of the youngest of his four children, Faris, who has never met his father. The family, who live in Battersea, south London, have had a difficult time coping. Aamer’s wife, Zin, suffers from depression and the children have been badly bullied because of who their dad is. Faris is struggling at school.

In a recent letter to the outside world from Aamer and six other prisoners, he wrote: “After these years of hardship that we have spent here, we want you to consider our cases as soon as possible and give us the right to a just and a public trial or set us free without restriction.”

Aamer, who worked for an Islamic relief organisation in Bosnia and Afghanistan, claims he was told by MI5 officers he could either spy on jihadists in the UK or stay in American custody. The US has accused Aamer of being Osama bin Laden’s personal interpreter, although he denies ever meeting him. In 2007 he was cleared for release.

His continuing detention is causing great concern among human rights campaigners, MPs and the British government, which has petitioned the US for his immediate release. His lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, who visited Aamer in November, has expressed deep concern about his declining health, made worse by several hunger strikes.

As part of the detainees’ financial agreement with the justice secretary, Ken Clarke, a sum is believed to have been set aside for Aamer, Britain’s last link to the discredited detention camp.

“We are all worried about Shaker,” said Asif Iqbal, 40, one of the “Tipton Three” who were among the first wave of British men to be released from Guantánamo in 2004 after two years in custody. All three were accused of visiting training camps for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and handling weapons. “We know what it is like to be there and there is only so long a man can survive. He was a figure of support to everyone in Guantánamo, he really looked out for people and fought for prisoners’ rights. That is probably why they won’t let him go now.”

Campaign groups such as Reprieve and Cageprisoners and charities such as the Helen Bamber Foundation are working to provide support for the traumatised men who return from Guantánamo.

“Coming back to Britain, you are branded, you live like a guilty man. You assume they are listening to every call, every conversation,” said Feroz Ali Abbasi, 31, from Croydon, who was imprisoned in Guantánamo in 2002 after being picked up in Afghanistan.

The US authorities say he fought alongside al-Qaida and the Taliban and attended training camps. His lawyers argue that Abbasi is one of a small group of idealistic young Muslim men who found themselves caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was released in 2005.

“When 7/7 happened I waited for them to kick down my door. I want to go to university and I’ve to think really carefully about what course I take. Can it be misconstrued, can it be linked to terrorism? When the authorities have behaved without logic, with such stupidness, you still believe they are after us, just waiting for an opportune moment,” he said.

“It’s hard when Britain didn’t look after you. I don’t think we [ex-detainees] are wanted in this country, we’re made not to feel wanted. But they took liberties in Guantánamo Bay, and if we do not speak out they will take liberties with someone else, Muslim or not.”

The experiences of being inside the camps have not left any of the detainees. Several who came to the Observer photoshoot still find it difficult to talk about what happened, including Tarek Dergoul, 34, from east London, who lost an arm and his toes in an US airstrike in Afghanistan where he said he was on a business trip to buy property. He has talked about his torture before, but today says he cannot and politely refused to be photographed. “Sometimes you can talk and sometimes it sticks in your throat,” he said.

Abbasi recognised how Dergoul is feeling: “For me, speaking English broke a lot of barriers, because if you speak to the guards you become a person. I had two years in isolation, so you had to talk to soldiers.

“I spent a lot of time analysing them and realised that for Americans they have to believe they are right. You have to be a terrorist. They assume you are both Taliban and al-Qaida, there is no doubt in their minds, and in their view they have a right to treat you badly, seeking their retribution.

“I remember looking through my cage at another man who had a wife and child and thought how lucky I was to be a single man so I could concentrate on myself surviving. You are on edge 24/7, your senses are tuned to what they will do to you next, a footstep, a bolt opening, the creak of a door. Once I’d left, my mind did strange things. I’d be walking down the street and see buildings on fire, cars on fire. I had this impulse to hit out at people, even my mother. It was very troubling. Over time I’m becoming myself, but I did forget who I was. You are in one consciousness all the time, one survival mode.”

The bonds created between the survivors are strong and all the men are here in order to support the campaign for the release of Shaker Aamer.

“The pain of Guantánamo is made much worse by the pain of people left there,” said Bisher al-Rawi, 44, an Iraqi living in Derby, who was released in 2007 after almost five years. “When Guantánamo started I was living in London and watching all about it on TV. Back then I truly believed that the people in Guantánamo were terrorists. It’s funny, but I did.”

Bisher said he was on a business trip to Gambia with his business partner, Jamil el-Banna, when he was arrested by the Gambian National Intelligence Agency in November 2002. They were later handed on to US authorities, who sent them to Bagram airbase and from there to Guantánamo Bay. US files show they were believed to have been in possession of bomb-making devices.

“It is like being thrown into a very dark grave. The level of fear it is possible to experience and survive is something terrible. I tried very hard to preserve my body and my mind and thought I had done a good job until I was released. The emotions involved are still very personal and overwhelming, there is a real deep pain. I try not to remember the faces of the people who hurt me, so I can concentrate on those who are left behind.”

Al-Rawi said he too was glad he did not have a family. “I’d been really hoping to get married and it didn’t work out; that was something I was very thankful for when I was in Guantánamo. The families suffered so much, I was glad that was not my family.”

The “no smoke without fire” approach has dogged all the survivors back in the UK. Omar Deghayes had to have CCTV fitted at his home by police because of months of racist attacks by local youths.

For Deghayes, 42, six years’ imprisonment in Guantánamo also destroyed his marriage. His wife in East Sussex wrote to him in prison, but her letters were never delivered and neither were his to her. Both believed they had been abandoned and she returned to her family in Afghanistan. It was, he has said, one of the cruellest things that happened to him during his detention.

The other was the loss of sight in one eye after a guard allegedly tried to gouge out his eyeballs with his fingers. Deghayes, a law graduate, fled Libya for the UK as a child after his father was executed by the Gaddafi regime. He had been living in Pakistan with his wife and child when he was picked up by the Americans.

Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, Deghayes now lives in Brighton and works with human rights group Reprieve and other survivors of Guantánamo on the ongoing court cases against the UK government’s alleged complicity in human rights abuses at Guantánamo and other detention centres around the world.

An inquiry into the involvement of British intelligence services in torture and rendition has opened but is not due to begin calling witnesses until all those cases have concluded. All the British detainees, and charities including Amnesty International, have announced they will boycott the Detainee Inquiry, headed by Sir Peter Gibson, because of concerns that it will not be open and transparent.

“We may never get a public inquiry and examination of what happened at Guantánamo,” said Worthington. “But we do know it has left a toxic legacy. Guantánamo was an aberration.”

Abbasi’s verdict was simple and damning: “Guantánamo was an excuse to take away the rights of ordinary people. It must not happen again.”

Last British resident held in Guantánamo Bay faces another year’s captivity
By Tracy McVeigh, The Observer, January 1, 2012

The last British resident being held in Guantánamo Bay faces at least another year in detention because of wrangling in a US presidential election year. Senior White House sources have said the Obama administration will not risk releasing Shaker Aamer before November. “We’ve taken enough hits from the right; we can’t risk any more,” one said. Another said: “There will be no rocking of boats from now on in.”

As the 10th anniversary of the opening of the detention camp in Cuba approaches, it is believed that the foreign secretary, William Hague, has called an urgent meeting early in the new year to discuss what more the British government can do to bring Aamer home.

He will complete his 10th year in Guantánamo on 14 February, although he has never been charged or faced trial. His British wife, Zin, last saw her husband when she was pregnant with their fourth child. Aamer has never met his son, Faris.

Campaigners are stepping up efforts to draw attention to Aamer’s case, after his British lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, found the 43-year-old former charity worker in poor health during a visit to the prison in November.

“I do not think it is stretching matters to say he is dying in Guantánamo Bay,” said Stafford-Smith, director of the human rights charity Reprieve. Although Aamer was cleared for release by the US authorities in 2007 there have been no further moves to return him to the UK. He was first picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 where he said he worked for an Islamic charity. But the US suspected him of both Taliban and al-Qaida connections, accusing him of being a translator for Osama bin Laden.

New US legislation has also proved to be a stumbling block to his release with the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, now responsible for certifying that Britain is a safe place for him to return to, and that he will commit no crimes there — something Panetta has been unwilling to do.

Stafford-Smith said: “Britain has the best record of any country with former Guantánamo prisoners, with nobody released committing any offence, and Shaker Aamer has never committed a crime of any kind. Why does Britain pretend it has a special relationship if a British resident is still in this shameful position?” He said Aamer had suffered “unfathomable abuse”.

Jane Ellison, Tory MP for Battersea, where Aamer’s wife and children live, is writing to Barack Obama to urge his immediate release. “People forget that behind this is a family in deep distress and a man in poor health,” she said. This is a human tragedy as much as a political embarrassment. The family of Shaker Aamer are hurting and they need him home.”

She has tabled several questions in the Commons drawing attention to Aamer’s plight and believes the UK Government is committed to bringing him home but is up against a lack of political will in the US.

“After 10 years, the bottom line should be that if they aren’t going to charge him, they should release him. That is the way we have conducted ourselves in Britain since the Magna Carta.”

But Aamer’s own campaigning spirit may be working against him. “The irony is that Shaker may be the victim of what he has done inside Guantanámo rather than anything he might be suspected of doing previous to his captivity. He has been a thorn in the side of the prison authorities, organising hunger strikes and fighting for prisoners’ rights. By all accounts he is a charismatic and eloquent man,” said investigative journalist and author Andy Worthington.

*****

The following is also from the double-page feature in the Observer:

The men America freed

Asif Iqbal, 40, of Tipton, West Midlands

Released in March 2004 after two years. On arrival at Guantánamo, a soldier told him: “You killed my family in the towers and now it’s time to get you back.”

Jamil el-Banna, 59, a Palestinian from Jordan

Has UK refugee status. He has five children, the last one born while he was in captivity. Released in 2007.

Jamal al-Harith, 45, from Manchester

A backpacker arrested by the Taliban who ended up in US detention. The web designer was freed in 2004 after two years.

Feroz Ali Abbasi, 31, from Croydon, south London

UK citizen born in Uganda. In 2002 the British Court of Appeal found his detention “legally objectionable”. Freed in 2005.

Bisher al-Rawi, 44, Iraqi-born

British resident living in Derby with wife and two young children. Picked up in Gambia in 2002 and freed in 2007.

Shafiq Rasul, 44, of Tipton, West Midlands

Released March 2004. US supreme court case Rasul vs Bush established detainees could challenge whether their detention is constitutional.

Rhuhel Ahmed [Ruhal Ahmed], 40, of Tipton, West Midlands

Held without trial or charge for more than two years. One of the Tipton Three who released a report detailing abuse and torture.

Martin Mubanga, 38, from Wembley, north London

Victim of extraordinary rendition, held for 33 months accused of al-Qaida links after his passport was found in a Pakistan base.

Moazzam Begg, 43, from Birmingham

After three years in US custody, he is now director of the London-based prisoners’ rights charity Cageprisoners Ltd and an outspoken critic of anti-terror legislation.

Tarek Dergoul, 34, from London

Claims to have gone to Afghanistan to buy up properties from fleeing refugees. Lost an arm and toes in an allied bombing raid. Although he attended the photoshoot to support his fellow detainees, he is deeply shy and politely refused to be photographed.

Omar Deghayes, 42, from Brighton

The Libyan-born British citizen was blinded, beaten and sexually assaulted between 2002 and 2007, despite having never been charged with an offence.

Richard Dean Belmar, 32, from London

Returned to the UK in 2005 after three years imprisonment, first in Pakistan, then Bagram and finally Guantánamo. Converted from Catholicism to Islam and had enrolled in a religious school in Afghanistan.

Binyam Mohamed, 33

An Ethiopian national who moved to the UK in 1994, he spent seven years in custody, four at Guantánamo. He was released in 2009. He is taking the government to court over British alleged complicity in his torture.

Sameur Abdenour [Abdulnour Sameur], 38, from London

Fled persecution from the military dictatorship in his native Algeria and was granted asylum in this country in 2000. He was detained in Guantánamo from 2002 to 2007.

… and one they still hold

Shaker Aamer, 43, Saudi-born

Next month Aamer will mark the 10th anniversary of his detention in Guantánamo. He worked as a legal translator in the UK and married a British woman in 1994. He claims to have been in Afghanistan working for a Saudi charity when he was picked up in 2002 and handed over to the Americans. He is thought to have angered the prison authorities by going on hunger-strike protests. He was cleared for release by the US in 2007 but remains in isolation.

Note: For further information, and to sign up to a new movement to close Guantánamo, please visit the new website, “Close Guantánamo,” which you can join here, and also please sign a new White House petition on the “We the People” website calling for the closure of Guantánamo. 25,000 signatures are needed by February 6.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

I’m delighted to discover that people remain interested in the Bush administration’s use of torture, and questions of accountability that have been brushed under the carpet by President Obama, not just because terrible crimes have been committed and no one has been held accountable, but also because the topic of America’s torture program has generally slipped off the media’s radar (as has that other abiding topic of interest of mine, Guantánamo, and the 171 prisoners still held).

Jeff has done a great job in pulling together examples of prisoners who were subjected not to waterboarding, but to other forms of torture using water that the Bush administration largely managed to avoid mentioning or being asked to justify, including Murat Kurnaz, who discussed having his head held under water in his book, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, first published in 2007, Mohammed al-Qahtani, the most notorious torture victim at Guantánamo, and others — the Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was, notoriously, “broken” by torture at Guantánamo, and who had water poured over him to “enforce control” and “keep [him] awake,” the British resident Omar Deghayes, the Algerian Djamel Ameziane (still held, desperate being cleared for release many years ago), and Mustafa Ait Idr, an Algerian living in Bosnia-Herzegovina, released in 2008 after winning his habeas petition, whose torture using water I mentioned in The Guantánamo Files, and in my article, After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims. Also of interest are examples from Iraq, which have also not been publicized widely.

Despite New Denials by Rumsfeld, Evidence Shows US Military Used Waterboarding-Style Torture
By Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, August 5, 2011

In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Sean Hannity recently that “no one was waterboarded at Guantánamo by the US military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantánamo, period.”

In his memoir, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld maintained, “To my knowledge, no US military personnel involved in interrogations waterboarded any detainees, not at Guantánamo or anywhere else in the world.” But as we shall see, Rumsfeld was either lying outright, or artfully twisting the truth.

Others have insisted as well that the military never waterboarded anyone. Law and national security writer Benjamin Wittes wrote in The New Republic last year that “the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody.” Harper’s columnist Scott Horton also noted last year, “There is no documentation yet of waterboarding at Gitmo, but the case book is far from closed on that score, too.”

Yet, though not widely reported and scattered among various articles and reports on detainee treatment by the military, including first-person accounts, there are a number of stories of forced water choking or drowning, both at Guantánamo and other US military sites.

In little-known testimony in May 2008 before Congress, former Guantánamo detainee Murat Kurnaz testified he endured a form of simulated drowning. In his testimony before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Kurnaz said that under US military captivity at Kandahar, Afghanistan, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, his head was “dunked under water to simulate drowning.”

Asked by Republican Congressman Rohrabacher if he hadn’t then been waterboarded, Kurnaz responded, “No, it’s not waterboarding. It’s called ‘water treatment.’ There was a bucket of water.”

ROHRABACHER: Was a cloth put over your face and you were put on a board?

KURNAZ: There was a bucket of water. And they stick my head in it and at the same time, punch me into my stomach.

Rohrabacher reportedly commented, “The CIA is claiming that that only three people have been waterboarded. And this may be a loophole that they’re suggesting that’s not ‘waterboarding.’”

According to a report on Kurnaz’s testimony at the time by The Christian Science Monitor, Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon replied to the torture charges: “The abuses Mr. Kurnaz alleges are not only unsubstantiated and implausible, they are simply outlandish.”

Whether implausible or not, waterboarding was one of a number of “counter-resistance techniques” requested for use at Guantánamo by Maj. Gen. Mike Dunleavy, commander of Task Force 170. In an October 2002 memo from Dunleavy’s intelligence chief requesting use of a number of techniques, including sensory deprivation, isolation, stress positions, forced nudity and death threats, there was also a proposal for “Use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.”

In a follow-up memo approving most, but not all of the requested techniques, Department of Defense (DoD) general counsel William J. Haynes II said of the “wet towel” and other so-called “aggressive” “Category III” techniques, “While all Category III techniques may be legally available, we believe that, as a matter of policy, a blanket approval of Category III techniques is not warranted at this time.” (Emphasis added.)

Water Torture at Guantánamo

Evidence regarding waterboarding or other forms of water torture by suffocation or choking at Guantánamo has been reported, but this article is the first collection of the various reports in one place.

Last April, a report by two doctors who were allowed to examine “medical records and relevant case files … of nine individuals for evidence of torture and ill treatment,” found at least one case of “near asphyxiation from water (i.e., hose forced into the detainee’s mouth)” and another case where a detainee’s head was forced into a toilet.

The report, by doctors Vincent Iacopino and Stephen N. Xenakis, was published at PLoS Medicine. Dr. Xenakis is also a retired brigadier general in the Army, who has worked as a medical consultant on a number of Guantánamo legal cases.

Additionally, accusations of military waterboarding turned up in a Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) report on “FBI Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations” that was released at almost the same time as Kurnaz’s testimony (May 2008). The IG noted that the chief of the FBI’s Military Liaison and Detainee Unit at Guantánamo told DoD Assistant Attorney General Dave Nahmias, “one of the planned or actual techniques used on [purported 9/11 would-be hijacker, Mohammed] al-Qahtani was simulated drowning.”

In fact, the military admits the use of pouring water over al-Qahtani’s head, as is discussed below.

At another point in the report, the IG describes one FBI agent who “once heard a discussion at GTMO when someone mentioned using water as an interrogation tool and someone else in the group said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen that.’” According to the IG report, no FBI agent actually reported seeing waterboarding or water torture him or herself.

Whether or not waterboarding was observed by FBI agents at Guantánamo, we know from the minutes of a “Counter-resistance Strategy meeting” at Guantánamo on October 22, 2002, that waterboarding (called the “wet towel” technique) was discussed (see Tab 7 at link). The meeting included legal officials from the CIA, DIA, the Guantánamo intelligence chief, as well as members of the Guantánamo Behavioral Science Consulting Team (BSCT).

At one point, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantánamo, asked whether SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) employed “the ‘wet towel’ technique.” Jonathan Fredman, then chief counsel to the CIA’s counter-terrorism center, replied:

If a well-trained individual is used to perform [sic] this technique it can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function. It is very effective to identify phobias and use them (i.e., insects, snakes, claustrophobia). The level of resistance is directly related to a person’s experience.

At this point, a BSCT psychiatrist noted, “Whether or not significant stress occurs lies in the eye of the beholder. The burden of proof is the big issue.” Fredman replied, “These techniques need involvement from interrogators, psych, medical, legal, etc.”

Fredman continued, “The CIA makes the call internally on most of the types of techniques found in the BSCT paper and this discussion.” In a reference to the approvals for waterboarding and other techniques given the CIA by Office of Legal Counsel memos a few months before, he added, “Significantly harsh techniques are approved through the DOJ.” There was no indication in the minutes from the meeting that waterboarding was not allowed for Defense Department use.

Waterboarding of Mohammed al-Qahtani

Mohammed al-Qahtani was a Saudi Arabian citizen brought to Guantánamo in early 2002. Ostensibly believed to be a part of the 9/11 plot, when interrogators became frustrated at their inability to get information out of him, or force his compliance, they turned to methods of interrogation that the Guantánamo Convening Authority Susan Crawford would later herself conclude amounted to torture.

By November 2002, al-Qahtani had become the “first subject of a Special Interrogation Plan,” which relied heavily on the military’s SERE torture school techniques, including isolation, stress positions, sexual humiliation and apparently, a form of waterboarding. SERE was created to provide US military personnel with training to resist torture.

Even years before Crawford’s admission, DoD’s Schmidt-Furlow report, looking at early allegations of detainee abuse, concluded that “the creative, aggressive and persistent interrogation of the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan [al-Qahtani] resulted in the cumulative effect being degrading and abusive treatment.” No one has ever been charged for such crimes committed against this or any other Guantánamo detainee.

The Schmidt-Furlow report details the use of water torture on al-Qahtani, an aspect of his torture that has been little reported:

On seventeen occasions, between 13 Dec 02 and 14 Jan 03, interrogators, during interrogations, poured water over the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan['s] head …

There is evidence that the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan regularly had water poured on his head. The interrogation logs indicate that this was done as a control measure only.

Time Magazine published al-Qahtani’s interrogation logs in 2005. The use of water to drench al-Qahtani’s head does not appear to be a “control measure” when it is discussed in the logs themselves.

On December 23, 2002, a log selection describes how interrogators hung pictures of swimsuit models around al-Qahtani’s neck. Then the lead interrogator “pulled pictures of swimsuit models off detainee and told him the test of his ability to answer questions would begin. Detainee refused to answer and finally stated that he would after [the] lead [interrogator] poured water over detainees [sic] head and was told he would be subjected to this treatment day after day. Detainee was told to think about his decision to answer questions.”

The day before, when al Qahtani had refused to look at “fitness photos,” saying it was against his religion, interrogators had “poured a 24 oz. bottle of water over detainee’s head.” The log notes dryly, “Detainee then began to look at photos.”

In their investigation of detainee abuse, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) noted in a 2008 report that the Navy limited waterboard demonstrations to two pints (32 oz.) of water. A January 13, 2003, memo, described in the SASC report, underreported how much water was poured over Qahtani, saying that “up to eight ounces of water” was poured over Qahtani’s head as a “method of asserting control” when Khatani exhibited ”undesired behavior.”

The SASC report also said that the interrogation plan for another Guantánamo detainee, Mohamadou Ould Slahi, included the practice of pouring water over Slahi’s head to “enforce control” and “keep [him] awake.”

Three More Guantánamo Detainees Report Suffocation by Drowning

Besides Kurnaz and al-Qahtani, at least three other detainees have reported being tortured at Guantánamo by application of water meant to cause suffocation, choking or the sensation of drowning.

A 2009 article by Jeremy Scahill outlined the torture and abuse endured by former Guantánamo detainee and British resident Omar Deghayes. Scahill mentions two incidents where the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF, sometimes called the Emergency Reaction Force, or ERF) used forms of water torture on Deghayes. In one case, the detainee was shackled, his head put into a toilet. The IRF team “pressed his face into the water. They repeatedly flushed it.”

The IRF or ERF team also came into Deghayes’ cell on another occasion and conducted a simulated or partial drowning:

The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. [Deghayes] was totally shackled and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present and they would join in.

According to Scahill, the IRF team conducted this form of waterboarding three times on Deghayes. Note that the presence of medical staff is consistent with the use of medical personnel under CIA descriptions of how they conducted waterboarding.

Another example of water torture involving Guantánamo guards appears in a document related to the case of Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian Berber who has been held at Guantánamo for over eight years, despite the fact he never received military or terrorist training, nor fought against the US. According to a 2008 legal filing for Ameziane by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):

In another violent incident, guards entered his cell and forced him to the floor, kneeing him in the back and ribs and slamming his head against the floor, turning it left and right. The bashing dislocated Mr. Ameziane’s jaw, from which he still suffers. In the same episode, guards sprayed cayenne pepper all over his body and then hosed him down with water to accentuate the effect of the pepper spray and make his skin burn. They then held his head back and placed a water hose between his nose and mouth, running it for several minutes over his face and suffocating him, an operation they repeated several times. Mr. Ameziane writes, “I had the impression that my head was sinking in water. I still have psychological injuries, up to this day. Simply thinking of it gives me the chills.” [Emphasis added.]

In March 2008, six Guantánamo detainees filed suit against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for failure “for many years to take any steps to negotiate and secure the men’s release from Guantánamo.” One of the men, Mustafa Ait Idr, who had been rendered to Guantánamo and “taken from his pregnant wife in violation of a Bosnian court order to free him,” also reported use of water torture in a manner remarkably similar to that of Ameziane.

A CCR report on “Torture, Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” said that on one occasion prison guards demanded to search Idr’s cell. Idr cooperated, but they came in, sprayed him in the face with a chemical irritant and put him into restraints.

According to the CCR report, “Guards then slammed him head first into the cell floor, lowered him, face-first into the toilet and flushed the toilet — submerging his head. He was then carried outside and thrown onto the crushed stones that surround the cells. While he was down on the ground, his assailants stuffed a hose in his mouth and forced water down his throat.” As a result, Idr’s face was paralyzed for several months.

Other threats to use waterboarding on DoD prisoners, or to rendition detainees for water torture, are also on record. According to journalist Robert Windrem in a 2009 story at The Daily Beast, then-Vice President Dick Cheney requested the waterboarding of Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, the head of the M-14 section of the Mukhabarat. According to the article, the official in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials at the time, Charles Duelfer, declined the request.

According to the SASC detainee report, the lead agency for SERE, Joint Forces Personnel Agency, constructed a CONOP (Concept of Operations) plan for use at a Special Mission Unit Task Force interrogation center in Iraq. The CONOP recommended use of the “water board.” Military legal figures reportedly objected to that and other techniques, but it is not known whether Special Forces in Iraq used waterboarding or other water torture techniques and the SASC report does not enlighten us on that point.

In another case, former Italian resident and Guantánamo detainee, Tunisian-born Saleh Sassi, reported that in late 2002, Tunisian agents came to Guantánamo and interrogated him. They “left no doubt about what awaited ex-Guantánamo inmates back in Tunisia: ‘water torture in the barrel’ and other horrors.” Sassi was released and sent to Albania in 2010.

Finally, the DOJ IG report on FBI interrogations referenced earlier describes how an Abu Ghraib prisoner, Saleh Muklef Saleh, was restrained and had cold water poured over him on more than one occasion. One time, according to Saleh’s own testimony, “They gave me one or two bottles of water and they asked me to drink it while I was hungry and they forced me to drink it and I did and I felt vomiting, then they ordered me to drink again and they were looking at me and laughing” (pp. 279-280).

Back in 2008, during the Congressional meeting where Murat Kurnaz testified to the use of water torture upon him, Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee commented, “It seems that we have a new definition … If you were wedded to the language of waterboarding, now we have new language called ‘water treatment,’ which may bear on being torture as well.”

To date, there has been no investigation that specifically has looked at the use of types of water torture, including waterboarding or water treatment, on detainees. The military’s current Army Field Manual on interrogation forbids the use of “waterboarding.” It is the only “prohibited action” term that is described with quotation marks around it.

A Human Rights Watch report issued on July 12 called for President Barack Obama “to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The appeal, by lawyers for MI5 — but with the explicit backing of the government — sought to overturn a ruling in the Court of Appeal last May, when judges ruled that the intelligence services could not suppress allegations, in a civil claim for damages submitted by six former Guantanamo prisoners, that the British government and its agents had been complicit in their ill-treatment. The six are Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga, and they argued, as the Guardian put it, that “MI5 and MI6 aided and abetted their unlawful imprisonment and extraordinary rendition.”

The ruling last May precipitated a huge crisis in the government, as the first of hundreds of thousands of classified documents emerged from the court, revealing the extent to which Tony Blair and Jack Straw were up to their necks in wrongdoing, preventing consular access to a British citizen in Zambia, in Tony Blair’s case, and in Straw’s, approving the rendition of British citizens to Guantanamo the day before the prison opened in January 2002. I covered this story in detail in my article, UK Sought Rendition of British Nationals to Guantánamo; Tony Blair Directly Involved.

As a result, ministers scrambled over each other in their rush to shut down further damaging leaks from the court by arranging for the former prisoners to accept compensation claims in exchange for dropping the civil claim for damages, persuading them that they would not be able to afford to proceed with their case if they did not accept the offer.

The settlement was announced in November, but the government immediately responded not with a dignified silence, which would have been appropriate as they wheedled their way out of the court-ordered release of evidence of complicity in torture at the highest levels of government, but with a provocative announcement by justice secretary Kenneth Clarke, who chose the very moment that the payments were announced to also announce that, in future, the work of Britain’s security services would be “permanently hidden from court hearings,” as the Guardian explained.

Kenneth Clarke told MPs that a government green paper, supposedly to be published this summer, would “contain specific proposals designed to prevent the courts from releasing the kind of information that has emerged from recent Guantánamo cases in the English courts.” A Whitehall official told the Guardian, “It will absolutely eliminate [the possibility of] the process happening again.”

The Guardian also explained that ministers had been “convinced by MI5 and MI6 that disclosing information held by the security and intelligence agencies — and notably information provided by foreign agencies such as the CIA –compromises Britain’s national security,” and that, as a result, they were planning to use a secret evidence and the system of speoial advocates, used in domestic terrorism cases, which has alarmed believers in open justice for many years.

To introduce secret evidence into the courts for cases involving domestic terror suspects, the government set up a ludicrous situation whereby special advocates are appointed to represent defendants in closed sessions in which secret evidence is discussed, but they are unable then to discuss anything that they see or hear with their clients, tying their hands and conjuring up the spirit of Franz Kafka, as I have discussed at length in previous articles — see, for example, Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Calling Time On The Use Of Secret Evidence In The UK, Control Orders: Solicitors’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010 and Control Orders: Special Advocates’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010.

In the cases of British nationals and foreign nationals held on control orders (a form of house arrest) on the basis of secret evidence, the Law Lords — the precursors to the Supreme Court — ruled in June 2009 that the system of secret evidence and special advocates infringed the men’s right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, so it was alarming that the government wanted to expand this system as a blanket ban on any future discussion of wrongdoing on the part of the security services.

The appeal that was decided by the Supreme Court on Wednesday was essentially testing the waters for the new proposals regarding secret evidence and the security services, and, a a result, the government’s plans are thoroughly discredited. See here for the judgment (120 pages, PDF), and see here for a brief summary issued by the Court.

Delivering the judgment, Lord Dyson said, “There are certain features of a common law trial which are fundamental to our system of justice, both criminal and civil. First, subject to certain established and limited exceptions, trials should conducted and judgments given in public. The importance of the open justice principle emphasised many times. The open justice principle is not a mere procedural rule. It is a fundamental common law principle.”

“Secondly,” Lord Dyson stated, “trials are conducted on the principle of natural justice,” and he warned that allowing a “closed procedure” in “an ill-defined way” could “be the thin end of the wedge,” adding, “This would be a big step for the law to take in view of the fundamental principles at stake. In my view this is a matter for parliament and not the courts.”

Lord Hope also had some powerful advice for the government, and a stirring defense of the law. “There comes a point,” he said, “where the line must be drawn between procedural choices which are regulatory only and procedural choices that affect the very substance of the notion of a fair trial. Choices that cut across absolutely fundamental principles — such as the right to be confronted by one’s accusers and the right to know the reasons for the outcome — are entirely different. The court has for centuries held the line as the guardian of these fundamental principles.”

He added, “Any weakening in the face of advances in the methods and use of secret intelligence in a case such as this would be bound to lead to attempts to widen the scope for an exception to be made to the principle of open justice.”

As the Guardian explained, Lord Brown warned that cases involving closed procedures “would mean that claims concerning allegations of complicity, torture and the like by UK intelligence services abroad would be heard in proceedings from which the claimants were excluded, with secret defences they could not see, secret evidence they could not challenge, and secret judgments withheld from them and from the public for all time.”

Lord Kerr added that, under the proposals put forward by the security services, “all the material goes before the judge and a claim that all of it involves national security or some other vital public interest will be very tempting to make.”

However, although the decision is “a significant victory for open justice,” as the Guardian explained, the nine judges “pointed out that parliament could change the law to permit such ‘closed material procedures’ in future.”

That should not be necessary, as, in the Supreme Court’s judgment, all nine judges “rejected the security service’s main submission that a court has a common law power to order a closed material procedure as an alternative to the more conventional public interest immunity (PII) certificate,” as the Guardian put it. They argued that such a power “would contravene fundamental and long-established principles of open and natural justice.”

If there is any valid area for discussion, it is with the “mission creep” of a secondary proposal by the security services –  that “a court has a common law power to order a closed material procedure as an add-on to a conventional PII in certain exceptional cases.” When pushed on fundamental problems with their cavalier attitude to the law as it relates to the perceived threat of terrorism, governments have tended to resort to introducing their dangerous innovations in “exceptional cases,”and as a result it is worth keeping a close eye on how the government responds to this particular point.

Nevertheless, this is, in general, a judgment to be savoured, and confirmation, yet again, that British judges are capable of maintaining their independence, despite intense political pressure, when it comes to dealing with issues involving terrorism and “national security.” In response to the judgment, Eric Metcalfe, of the all-party law reform group JUSTICE, which was involved in the case, said, “The ruling has confirmed that secret evidence has no place in the common law. It is a clear setback for the government’s plans to extend the use of secret evidence and secret hearings in our courts. Although it is open to parliament to legislate further, today’s ruling sets a high hurdle for any MP seeking to cut across centuries of common law tradition.”

Let us hope that Eric Metcalfe is correct, and, if not, that those of us who have had enough secrecy and complicity in torture in the last ten years, can say to Parliament that enough is enough, and that we do not want the expansion of the secrecy state, and do not want politicians and the intelligence services to have new opportunities to hide their wrongdoing under the feeble guise of “national security.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

“[T]his is a strong movie examining the imprisonment and subsequent torture of those falsely accused of anti-American conspiracy.”
Joe Burnham, Time Out

As featured on Democracy Now!, ABC News and Truthout. Buy the DVD here, and please click on the image to enlarge the poster.

Throughout 2011, Andy Worthington, investigative journalist and author of The Guantánamo Files, will be touring the UK, showing the documentary “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington) and attending post-screening Q&A sessions. On some dates, Andy will be joined by former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, who is now the legal director of the Guantánamo Justice Centre, Polly Nash, and other guests yet to be confirmed. Amnesty International UK is providing publicity and some support for the tour.

The 2011 UK tour follows a 35-date UK tour undertaken by Andy last year (often in the company of Omar Deghayes), and, for the most part, involves events arranged by Amnesty International student groups, following an initiative launched at the Amnesty International Student Conference at the Human Rights Action Centre in London in November 2010, where Andy was a speaker, and where he invited student groups to hold screenings.

The tour also follows screenings in the US last October and in January this year, and a week-long tour of Poland in the first week of February 2011, and also coincides with two appearances in film festivals — the D.C. Independent Film Festival in Washington D.C. on March 5, 2011, and the Bradford International Film Festival, which takes place between March 16 and 27, 2011. Further information about these screenings will be announced soon.

The intention of the tour, as with every screening, is to raise awareness of the truth about Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons and torture, explaining how the Bush administration turned its back on domestic and international laws, rounding up men and boys in Afghanistan and Pakistan without adequate screening (and often for bounty payments), and also explaining why some of these men may have been in Afghanistan or Pakistan for reasons unconnected with militancy or terrorism (as missionaries or humanitarian aid workers, for example).

The film focuses on the stories of three prisoners — Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who is still held, and Binyam Mohamed and Omar Deghayes (both released) — and features interviews with former prisoners Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes, lawyers Clive Stafford Smith and Tom Wilner, and journalist Andy Worthington, plus appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Imam Shakeel Begg, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Take action for Shaker Aamer!

In addition, this year’s tour focuses specifically on the ongoing plight of Shaker Aamer. Although he was cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2007, Shaker, a Saudi national with a British wife and four British children, is still held, despite the fact that, last November, he was included in a financial settlement that the British government reached with 15 former prisoners (which he obviously cannot conclude while held in Guantánamo), despite the fact that the Metropolitan Police are investigating his claims that British agents witnessed his abuse by US soldiers in a prison in Afghanistan, before his transfer to Guantánamo in February 2002, and despite the fact that the coalition government’s planned judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture abroad, announced by Prime Minister David Cameron last July, cannot legitimately start while he is still held.

In seeking to understand why Shaker Aamer has not been released, his lawyers, and everyone else who has studied his case closely, has been obliged to conclude that it is not because he poses a threat to anyone, or that he was engaged in any kind of terrorist activity, but because, as the foremost defender of the prisoners’ rights, he knows too much about the dark workings of Guantánamo, and, in particular, because, on the night in June 2006 that three men died in Guantánamo under mysterious circumstances (in contrast to the authorities’ claim that they committed suicide), Shaker has stated that he was subjected to brutal torture, and thought that he would die.

Letters to the British and American governments will be available at these events, but if you want to write now to demand Shaker’s return to his family in the UK, please visit this Amnesty International campaign page, where you can write directly to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In addition, via my site, you can also write to Foreign secretary William Hague using the template here, or write to your MP here, or write to Hillary Clinton and Daniel Fried, the US Special Envoy on Guantanamo, here.

Below is a list of eight confirmed screenings to date, plus one other speaking event that does not involve a screening. Unless otherwise noted, all events are free. Further screenings will be added to a dedicated page for the 2011 tour, and announced via new blog entries.

February 2011

Monday February 14, 6.30 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
Hamilton House, 80 Stokes Croft, Bristol, BS1 3QY.
This event is organized by the University of Bristol Amnesty International Society, with support from other Bristol Amnesty groups.
For further information, please contact Sam Knight. Also see the Facebook page.

Friday February 18, 7 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
Durham University, Room ER140, Elvet Riverside, New Elvet, Durham, DH1 3JT.
This event is organized by Durham University Amnesty International Society, with the support of Durham University Law, Sociology, Politics and Anthropology Departments.
For further information, please contact Alice Thubron. Also see the Facebook page. Click on the image to enlarge the poster.

Saturday February 19, 5 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
Teviot Dining Room (Student Union building), Bristo Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9AJ.
This event is organized by the Edinburgh University Amnesty International Society and the Stirling University Amnesty group, with participation from Edinburgh Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh Napier University, Glasgow University and the University of St. Andrews.
For further information, please contact Emily Segaran. See here for information about the Teviot venues.

Wednesday February 23, 7.30 pm: Talk by Andy Worthington – “Outside the law: what next for the detainees in Guantanamo Bay?”
Latimer Room, Clare College, University of Cambridge, CB2 1TL.
I’m delighted to have been asked to speak at this event organized by Cambridge University Amnesty International society and the Cambridge Hub, a charity that connects students with causes and encourages them to help tackle the social and environmental issues that challenge us today.
The evening will begin with pre-event drinks at 7.15pm, with the 30-minute presentation starting at 7.30pm, followed by a question and answer session. Further drinks will follow the talk and provide an opportunity for students to have  further discussions with the speaker and attendees. Other recent speakers that the Student Hubs network has hosted across Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and Southampton include: Dr. Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court; Professor Anthony Giddens, British sociologist; Jon Snow, British broadcaster; Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for International Development; Tim Smit, Founder of the Eden Project; and Dr. Ian Goldin, former Vice President of the World Bank. See the term card here.
For further information, please contact Ruth Graham.

March 2011

Thursday March 3, 6 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
King’s College London, Stamford Street Residence Lecture Theatre, Franklin Wilkins Building, Stamford Street, London, SE1 8WA.
This event is organized by King’s College Amnesty International Society, and has been announced as follows: “This is the highlight of our activities this term, and probably the academic year, as Andy is a great historian and an expert on Guantánamo. We are really excited about this event and the expertise Andy provides!”
For further information, please contact Ela Drazba. Also see the Facebook page.

Monday March 7, 6.30 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
Nottingham University, Room B63, Law and Social Sciences Building, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD.
This event is orgnaized by Nottingham University Amnesty International Society, as part of a week of events covering unlawful detention and torture, which includes a performance of “Rendition Monologues” by iceandfire Theatre on March 9.
For further information, please contact Alea Nasihin.

Friday March 11, 6 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
SOAS, Lucas Lecture Theatre (G2), SOAS Main Building, Thornhaugh Street, London, WC1H 0XG.
This event is organized by SOAS Student Union and SOAS Amnesty International Society.
For further information, please contact Vicky Chenery. Also see the Facebook page.

Monday March 14, 8.30 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington.
Warwick University, Lecture Theatre L5, Science Concourse, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry, CV4 7AJ.
This event is organized by Warwick University Amnesty International Society as part of a “Protect the Human” Week, which is starting with a day focused on terrorism and security.
Also, please note that, at 5 pm, I’ll be taking part in another event, “Question Time: Liberty v. Security — 10 Years On.” For this panel discussion, chaired by Prof. Trevor McCrisken (Warwick PAIS), I’ll be joining David Davis MP, Robin Simcox (Centre for Social Cohesion) and Ghaffar Hussain (Quilliam Foundation) to discuss the following questions: 1) Are control orders justified? 2) Is closing Guantánamo Bay feasible? 3) Islamophobia and radicalisation — myth or matter? 4) The balance between liberty and security since 9/11 — your verdict? All I can say is that, with that line-up, sparks may fly …
For further information, please contact Jesko Bartelt. Also see the Facebook page and website.

Thursday March 24, 7 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Omar Deghayes and Andy Worthington.
Cardiff University, Main Building, Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3QN.
This event is organized by Cardiff Stop the War.
For further information, please contact Adam Johannes on 07940 108146 or email.

For further information, interviews, or to inquire about broadcasting, distributing or showing “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” please contact Polly Nash or Andy Worthington, and please see below for the first five minutes of the film:

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Described as “a powerful film that has helped ensure that Guantánamo and the men unlawfully held there have not been forgotten” by Kate Allen, the director of Amnesty International UK, and as “a strong movie examining the imprisonment and subsequent torture of those falsely accused of anti-American conspiracy” by Time Out, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” tells the story of Guantánamo  (including sections on extraordinary rendition and secret prisons) with a particular focus on how the Bush administration turned its back on domestic and international laws, how prisoners were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan without adequate screening (and often for bounty payments), and why some of these men may have been in Afghanistan or Pakistan for reasons unconnected with militancy or terrorism (as missionaries or humanitarian aid workers, for example).

The film is based around interviews with former prisoners (Moazzam Begg and Omar Deghayes), lawyers for the prisoners (Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, and Tom Wilner, who was Counsel of Record to the Guantánamo prisoners in their cases before the US Supreme Court), and journalist and author Andy Worthington, and also includes appearances from Guantánamo’s former Muslim chaplain James Yee, Shakeel Begg, a London-based Imam, and the British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce.

Focusing on the stories of three particular prisoners — Shaker Aamer (who is still held) and released prisoners Binyam Mohamed and Omar Deghayes — “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” provides a powerful rebuke to those who believe that Guantánamo holds “the worst of the worst” and that the Bush administration was justified in responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by holding men neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects with habeas corpus rights, but as “illegal enemy combatants” with no rights whatsoever.

The tour, organized by Anna Minkiewicz, a supporter of Andy Worthington’s work and that of Cageprisoners, is backed by Le Monde Diplomatique in Poland, with additional support from Amnesty International Poland, and is intended to raise awareness of the truth about Guantánamo — that very few of the men held are alleged to have had any connection to terrorist actvities, and that the prison’s very existence is an affront to established laws and treaties, and to common notions of fairness and decency.

The organizers also intend the tour to provide the impetus for parliamentarians to recognize that there are, currently, up to 31 men in Guantánamo who have been cleared for release, but who cannot be repatriated because they face a credible risk of torture or other ill-treatment in their home countries, and to press for Poland to join 15 other countries — including Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain and Switzerland — in offering new homes to some of these men.

We also anticipate that the tour will provide an opportunity for timely discussions about the Polish government’s complicity in the establishment of a secret CIA prison in Poland, following the announcement on January 20 that the “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah has been granted “victim” status by the Polish Prosecutor in connection with an ongoing investigation into the prison, at Stare Kiejkuty, near Szymany. This follows the granting of “victim” status to another “high-value detainee,” Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, in October last year.

Also showing will be two short animated films by Afghan filmmaker Said Mohsen Hossaini.

Information about the tour is available below.

For further information, or to arrange interviews, please contact Andy Worthington. The contacts in Poland are Anna Minkiewicz, Przemyslaw Wielgosz, the chief editor of the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique and, at Amnesty International, press officer Aleksandra Minkiewicz.

Please note that other speakers are still to be confirmed, and please also note that Moazzam Begg will only be in Poland on February 1 and 2.

Tuesday February 1, 15:00 hrs: Press conference to discuss Guantánamo and the secret CIA prison in Poland with Moazzam Begg, Andy Worthington and Bartlomiej Jankowski.
Kino Muranów, ul. Gen. Andersa 1 (Plac Bankowy, metro “Ratusz”), 00-147, Warszawa.
Subject to final confirmation, Moazzam Begg and Andy Worthington will be joined for the press conference on Tuesday by Bartlomiej Jankowski, the lawyer for Abu Zubaydah. The organizers also hope that Mikołaj Pietrzak, the lawyer for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and Irmina Pacho of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, which played a major role last summer in exposing flight records demonstrating the movement of prisoners to and from the prison, will also be available to discuss this crucial matter of international significance.

Tuesday February 1, 20:00 hrs: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” in association with the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique and Amnesty International Poland.
Followed by Q&A with Moazzam Begg, Andy Worthington, Bartlomiej Jankowski, the lawyer for Abu Zubaydah, and Draginja Nadażdin, director, Amnesty International Poland.
Kino Muranów, ul. Gen. Andersa 1 (Plac Bankowy, metro “Ratusz”), 00-147, Warszawa.
See the website here or email.
Media partner: międzynarodowy kolektyw Globale (Berlin-Montevideo-Warszawa). Please contact Bartek Kurzyca on (48) 515 603 907 or by email.

Wednesday February 2, 18:00 hrs: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Moazzam Begg, Andy Worthington and Wojciech Makowski, Amnesty International Poland.
Kino studyjne „Kinematograf”, Pl. Zwycięstwa 1, Łódź.
Phone: (48) 42 674 0957 (contacts are Anna Michalska or Jakub Sas) or see the website here, and see here for a map.
Media partner: The local branch of Krytyka Polityczna. Please contact: Marek Jedliński.

Thursday February 3, 20:00 hrs: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.”
Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington and Draginja Nadażdin, director, Amnesty International Poland.
Kino Rialto, ul. Dąbrowskiego 38, Poznań.
Phone: (48) 61 847 5399 or email Piotr Zakens (also on 600 254 502). Also see the website here.

Friday February 4, 18:00 hrs: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington and ex-MEP Józef Pinior.
Kino Warszawa, ul. Piłsudskiego 64, Wrocław.
Please note that Józef Pinior was a member of the EU commission which investigated EU involvement in rendition and secret prisons.
Phone: (48) 071 342 1246.
Media partner: Kolektyw Falanster. Contact: Aneta Jerska. Also with support from the Odra Film Institution and Amnesty International Wrocław.

Saturday February 5, evening, 20:00 hrs: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.”
Followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington and Anna Minkiewicz.
Kino Agrafka, ul. Krowoderska 8, Kraków.
See the website here. or phone (48) 12 430 0179 or mobile: 57 123 233.
Media partner: Fundacja Cyrk Edison. Contact: Robert Skrzydlewski.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

His comments provided a powerful conclusion to the rally, and a reminder not only of how justice still eludes the 173 men still held, but also of how the American people are prevented from hearing about the injustices of Guantánamo first hand, as Omar, and every other cleared prisoner, is prevented from visiting the US to meet people and to tell their stories, and the Obama administration, Congress and the D.C. Circuit Court have all made sure that no cleared prisoner will be allowed to live in the US, even if they face torture in their home countries, and no other country can be found that is prepared to offer them a new home.

A statement from Omar Deghayes, January 11, 2011

Two years ago, President Barack Obama pledged to bring an end to the anomaly that is Guantánamo within a year, and to thereby restore America’s moral standing in the world. Yet today, on January 11, 2011, we are marking the beginning of the tenth year since the first prisoners were transferred to Camp X Ray — and Guantánamo remains open, Obama’s promise in ruins.

This past December 19th just marked three years to the day that I tasted freedom again and was released from Guantánamo to the warm embrace of my family and the community who fought so hard for my freedom. But not a day has passed since in which my thoughts and prayers have not remained with the 173 men who continue to languish in Guantánamo, detained without trial, most of them not facing any charge, and entering their tenth year of being separated from their loved ones. 90 of these men have actually been cleared for release long ago.

One of these men who continues to be unjustly detained is Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still detained at Guantánamo who has yet to come home to the UK. Today we remember Shaker’s wife and four children — all of whom are British nationals, the youngest of whom has never seen his father. Shaker’s children are being forced to endure yet another year of suffering, not knowing if or when their beloved father will return. Justice has been delayed yet another year for Shaker and the other 173 men detained in Cuba; and justice delayed is justice denied.

If this was not enough, President Obama’s intention to sign an executive order formalising the indefinite detention of the prisoners in Guantánamo now leaves us with the very real and disturbing prospect that, if we collectively fail to act and stand up, many of the men who continue to be held in Guantánamo will be left to rot there indefinitely. It is therefore vital that the American people continue in their efforts; and I cannot thank you enough for your tremendous courage and resilience in keeping up the fight for the prisoners in Guantánamo and ensuring that these men are not forgotten.

As we enter the tenth year of this lawlessness, I and the former prisoners who, with me, formed the Guantánamo Justice Centre in 2009, are united with one voice in calling upon President Obama to fulfill his promise and bring a swift end to the shameful stain on the United States that is Guantánamo. We call on the Obama administration to free the remaining prisoners from what Adnan Abdul Latif, one Yemeni prisoner, recently called a “piece of hell that kills everything, the spirit, the body and kicks away all the symptoms of health from them,” and to resettle those wrongly detained where they can rebuild their lives in safety and in peace.

In solidarity,
Omar Deghayes
Legal Director, Guantanamo Justice Centre, London, UK.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Ending Bush’s big lie on Guantánamo
Andy Worthington, The Guardian, January 6, 2011

In the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” it was important to dehumanise the men held at Guantánamo, to give life to the myth that the prison held “the worst of the worst” terrorists, picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

This was not true, as reports over the years have demonstrated. A former military interrogator in Afghanistan, writing under the pseudonym Chris Mackey, explained in his book The Interrogators that there was no screening process in place, and that every Arab who came into US custody, by whatever method, had to be transferred to Guantánamo.

Moreover, in 2006, an analysis of the Pentagon’s own allegations against 517 prisoners (compiled after 200 men and boys had already been released), and conducted by researchers at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey, found that 86 percent were captured by the Northern Alliance or Pakistani forces, 55 percent were not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the US or its allies, and only 8 percent were alleged to have had any kind of affiliation with al-Qaeda.

In addition, around half the prisoners were not captured in Afghanistan, but were either seized in Pakistan, or crossing the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan, and although many of the men were foot soldiers for the Taliban, who had been involved in the long-standing civil war against the Northern Alliance, which had begun many years before the 9/11 attacks, others were missionaries, humanitarian aid workers, or economic migrants, and only 33 of the remaining 174 prisoners have been recommended for trial by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which reviewed all the cases in 2009.

As the prison at Guantánamo prepares to start its tenth year of operations (on January 11), and as I begin a week of events in New York and Washington D.C. to raise awareness of the remaining prisoners, these men are still, for the most part, as dehumanised as they were under President Bush.

Part of the attempt to raise awareness involves showing the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” which I co-directed with filmmaker Polly Nash, and which features compelling and emotional testimony from former Guantánamo prisoners Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg, both seized in 2002 from the homes where they were living in Pakistan, many hundreds of miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan, and sent to Guantánamo.

Last year, I travelled around the UK with Omar Deghayes, showing the film to audiences of students and activists who were grateful for the opportunity to meet Omar, after listening to his harrowing descriptions of how he was mistreated, and how the British security services colluded in his abuse, but when I travel to the US, I am not allowed to visit with Omar, or with Moazzam, or with any other cleared prisoner.

Audiences in the States are also moved by Omar’s testimony, when they have the opportunity to see it, but it would have a much greater impact if they were able to meet a former prisoner in person.

Sadly, the Obama administration is largely to blame for this state of affairs. In early 2009, White House Counsel Greg Craig was close to finalising a plan to rehouse a handful of cleared prisoners who could not be repatriated safely. These men were the Uighurs, Muslims for China’s Xinjiang province, seized by mistake, who had won their habeas corpus petition in a US court in October 2008, and their presence in the US would have done more to destroy the Bush administration’s enduring lies than any other gesture.

However, when Republicans got wind of it, and reacted with unjustifiable outrage, Obama quashed the plan, making it difficult for the US to find third countries prepared to take cleared prisoners who could not be repatriated, and contributing to the paralysis that Obama finds himself in today: presiding over a prison in which, although over half the remaining prisoners have been cleared for release by Obama’s Task Force, cynical lawmakers, and the President’s own cowardice, have made it increasingly difficult for him to release anyone.

Anonymity — the dehumanisation of these men — helps to maintain the illusion that their ongoing detention is somehow justifiable, but if their stories, and the circumstances of their capture, were more widely known, the Bush administration’s enduring mythology might be thoroughly punctured, and more substantial steps taken — or demanded — to secure their release. Bringing the stories of Omar Deghayes and Moazzam Begg to the American public can, hopefully, play a part in this still necessary process.

Details of this evening’s screening:

Friday January 7, 7 pm: Film screening – “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” followed by Q&A with Andy Worthington and Scott Horton.
Revolution Books, 146 West 26th Street (between 6th & 7th Ave.), New York, NY 10001.
A donation of $10 is requested for the film, drinks and popcorn, to benefit Revolution Books. For further information, see the Revolution Books website, or contact the store by email or by phone: 212-691-3345. A Facebook page is here.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

I’m glad to report, however, that the students in the Human Rights Society at UCL, and the human rights students at Roehampton were thoroughly engaged audiences, who peppered the speakers (myself and former prisoner Omar Deghayes at UCL, and myself and Polly at Roehampton) with questions, and listened intently as Omar spoke about his experiences — and those of his fellow prisoners — in US custody throughout the darkest years of a “War on Terror” that has not, sadly, been brought to an end by President Obama.

In addition, I told the sorry story of how Obama’s plans to close the prison have ground to a halt, but reminded the audiences that they can act to secure the return of Shaker Aamer — by writing to William Hague, writing to their MPs, encouraging their MPs to sign up to a Early Day Motion on Guantánamo proposed by the Green MP Caroline Lucas, and sending a postcard to Shaker in Guantánamo — and that they should take heart that the time has come for the exhaustion of any and all excuses to prevent his return.

This is because of the British government’s recent financial settlement with 15 former Guantánamo prisoners, and with Shaker, whose settlement cannot ultimately be agreed without his presence, because of an ongoing Metropolitan Police investigation into his allegations of torture in US custody in Afghanistan, while British agents were present, which cannot conclude without his presence, and because the judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture, which David Cameron announced in July, and which he wants to use to “draw a line” under the whole sordid affair, cannot even begin while one of the men whose evidence will need to be considered by the inquiry — Shaker Aamer — is still held in Guantánamo.

Those of us who have been studying his case closely for many years know that, ultimately, Shaker — who was cleared for release by a military review board under President Bush in 2007 — is not held because of any threat he poses to the national security of either the US or the UK, but because of his deep knowledge of American involvement in torture — and, perhaps, murder — at Guantánamo and his equally deep knowledge of American torture (and British complicity) elsewhere, which he learned and/or experienced as the foremost defender of the prisoners’ rights, and as an eloquent and passionate man who will not stand for injustice.

For Saturday’s event the BBC, the Press Association, AFP and Scotland on Sunday all reported on the rally at the site of the new US embassy, but failed to follow the march to Battersea Arts Centre for the main focus of the day, attended by many hundreds of people — a public meeting, chaired by the journalist and playwright Victoria Brittain, at which the speakers included Moazzam Begg, former Guantánamo prisoner and director of Cageprisoners, human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, the journalist Yvonne Ridley,  and Anas Altikriti, the President and founder of the Cordoba Foundation. Press TV did turn up, however, and a report on the day’s events can be found here.

By the time I arrived later in the afternoon, the crowd had thinned out, but around 150 people stayed to watch “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” and afterwards there was a very lively Q&A session with myself, Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes and Polly Nash, in which Moazzam, in particular, was called upon to explain in detail how the recent financial settlements arose, which he did with some dignity, explaining how senior government ministers had, for the first time, listened to the prisoners and taken their stories on board, stressing that the release of Shaker had been central to the negotiations, but that the former prisoners had not been allowed to make the settlement reliant upon a firm promise that he would be freed, and refuting a claim that they had somehow sold out, or been bought off, by pointing out that, had they refused the settlement, those who were working would have been unable to pursue the case, because of the huge expenee involved, and those who were not would have had their legal aid cut off.

Personally, I believe that so much has already been exposed — including, in summer, direct evidence of the complicity in torture of Tony Blair and Jack Straw — that the settlement to bring to an end the civil claim filed by seven former prisoners is not the end of the story, especially as all the men have not been “gagged” as a result of the settlement, and have not been obliged to drop any of their allegations  about British complicity in their treatment in US custody — and, in some cases, in their abduction.

When I spoke, I was at pains to stress, as I had at UCL and in Roehampton, that, at present, everyone who is concerned about these matters should focus all their energies on securing Shaker’s return, which clearly cannot be put off for much longer, despite a rather feeble statement from the Foreign Office, as reported by Scotland on Sunday. A spokeswoman told the paper, “The Foreign Secretary raised the case of Shaker Aamer with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during his visit to Washington in November and was told that the US government continues to consider the case. As the Prime Minister has made clear to Parliament, the government continues to make best efforts to secure Shaker Aamer’s release and return to the UK. Ultimately this is a matter for the US.”

This last sentence is particularly worrying, as Shaker’s return is not just “a matter for the US,” but involves two countries — both the US and the UK — and the British government must not be allowed to forget that it can — and must — make Shaker’s return a priority.

Unfortunately, one of the star guests for Saturday’s event, Mayoral candidate and former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, was unable to attend, but he sent along a message, which was read out at the end of the event, and which, I believe, provides a suitable conclusion to this report. He wrote:

It’s an absolute disgrace that prisoners including Shaker Aamer have been held without charge or trial at Guantánamo, and it’s now imperative that the British government starts to make real efforts to end this fundamental breach of human rights.

No one should be imprisoned without the basic human right to a trial. Guantánamo Bay is a stain on global politics and a symbol of everything that went wrong under Bush.

The impact on the families of those whose human rights are breached through indefinite imprisonment without trial is massive. It is impossible to imagine the effect on those people. Despite claiming they were doing “as much as they could,” it has now become clear that the issue was only raised sporadically and with little drive by previous foreign ministers.

It is a continuing scandal that the US will not simply release Shaker Aamer back to Britain.

Guantánamo Bay must be permanently closed, Shaker returned to Britain and never again must we allow our government to destroy human rights internationally at the behest of the US or any other power.

My thanks again to the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign for their hard work in organizing and promoting the event, to the sponsors, to everyone who turned up, and also to the organizatons who supported it: Stop the War Coalition, Unite Against Fascism, Love Music Hate Racism, Guantánamo Justice Centre, South London SWP, Kingston Peace Council, Brighton Against Guantánamo, Brighton and Hove Mosque, South London Communist Party of Britain, London Guantánamo Campaign, Justice for Aafia Coalition, Sutton for Peace & Justice, Norwich Amnesty Group, Battersea Islamic Culture & Education Centre, and Kingston Amnesty Group.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

How the financial settlement arose

Seven former prisoners first sued the British government and the security services last year, seeking damages for their role in unlawful acts and conspiracy, through their involvement in, or their failure to stop, their detention and ill-treatment in US custody (or US supervision in other countries), and, in some cases, their “extraordinary rendition” to secret prisons. These men were Moazzam Begg, Binyam Mohamed, Omar Deghayes, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna, Martin Mubanga and Richard Belmar.

When the government’s preferred route out of this tricky situation — seeking and securing judicial approval for MI5, MI6 and the police to be able to withhold evidence from defendants and their lawyers on the basis of national security — was overturned by the Court of Appeal in May this year, it was obvious that their only escape route would be to negotiate an out of court settlement with the seven men. In their ruling, the judges in the Court of Appeal — including Lord Neuberger, the Master of ther Rolls — said they were obliged to “take a stand” against secrecy that would undermine the “most fundamental principles of common law,” and Lord Neuberger pointed out that “a litigant’s right to know the case against him and to know the reasons why he has lost or won is fundamental to the notion of a fair trial.”

The government moved swiftly. On July 6, David Cameron announced that there would be a judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture, telling the House of Commons that he had asked Sir Peter Gibson, a former appeal court judge who monitors the activities of the intelligence agencies, to “look at whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees held by other countries that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11.” Cameron noted that, although there was no evidence that any British officer was “directly engaged in torture,” there were “questions over the degree to which British officers were working with foreign security services who were treating detainees in ways they should not have done.”

Crucially, David Cameron also made it clear that the inquiry could not begin “until civil claims have been resolved through mediation or settled with compensation,” as the Guardian explained, and until Metropolitan Police investigations into the activities of MI5 and MI6 agents concluded. These concern Binyam Mohamed (returned to the UK in February 2009), who was subjected to two years of torture (with British knowledge) in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2004, and Shaker Aamer, married with a British wife and four British children, who is still held in Guantánamo, despite being cleared for release in 2007. Originally from Saudi Arabia, Shaker had traveled to Afghanistan in June 2001 with former prisoner Moazzam Begg and their families to establish a girls’ school and some well-digging projects, but was seized by bounty hunters after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and subsequently sold to US forces.

The need for the government to seek an out of court settlement grew even more pressing just a week after the announcement of the inquiry, when ministers were unable to prevent the first release of documents as a result of the ongoing court case. Less than a thousand in number, out of 500,000 documents being reviewed by lawyers and intelligence personnel, these documents neverthless contained startling new discoveries: that foreign secretary Jack Straw had been content for British prisoners to be taken to Guantánamo in January 2002, when the prison opened, and was only concerned that British agents would have time to interrogate them in Afghanistan before the Americans rendered them to its lawless enclave in Cuba; and that Prime Minister Tony Blair had interfered to prevent the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from granting consular access to Martin Mubanga, a British citizen seized in Zambia, who, as a result, was also sent to Guantánamo.

In the wake of this release of documents, the government stepped up its planning for the judicial inquiry, actively engaging in negotiations with former prisoners and their lawyers, which, after four months of detailed discussions, led to the settlements announced on Monday.

Why the financial settlement is an acknowledgment of guilt

However, although the Prime Minister’s spokesman told reporters on Tuesday morning, “We are not admitting culpability,” and proceeded to follow the government line that “We were in a situation where we were facing years of litigation, the cost of which would have been tens of millions of pounds,” and that “We had to draw a line under the past and let [the security services] get on with the job that they have to do,” even a cursory glance at what has taken place over the last four months reveals that Downing Street — and Kenneth Clarke, who repeated the message in the House of Commons — are not being entirely honest.

When the story broke on Monday night, the only ex-prisoners mentioned were the seven men involved in the damages claim, but by Tuesday it was clear that settlements had been made with 16 men in total — all of the British citizens and residents returned between 2004 and 2009, and Shaker Aamer, despite the fact that he is still held in Guantánamo.

If, as the government claims, the aim of the settlements is to bring to an end the court case that was proving so costly and so dangerous to the security services (and former government ministers), then there would be no need to include all these other men, who are not actually engaged in litigation.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this, and neither reflects well on the government. The first is that the settlements are indeed an acknowledgement of guilt, and the second is that the government is trying to make sure that there are no loose ends — or loose cannons — around for when the inquiry begins its work. This suggests that the government is hoping to ensure that the inquiry will be able to guarantee that enough damaging material as possible is safely removed from public scrutiny, so that its real business — going through the motions, leading to the odd slapped wrist — will not be able to be challenged.

Personally, I doubt that such a plan will be successful, as so much information relating to British complicity in torture is already in the public domain, and any attempt at a whitewash will be met with fierce resistance. Moreover, although the ex-prisoners have accepted a settlement to drop their civil claim against the government, they have not, as Kenneth Clarke admitted in Parliament, “withdrawn their allegations,” and it remains possible, therefore, that one day those who facilitated or turned a blind eye to their torture and abuse might still face prosecution.

As it is, all the former prisoners have made it clear in the last few days that they intend to make their allegations, with evidence, directly to Gibson when the inquiry begins, and Moazzam Begg has explained that Cageprisoners will be submitting its findings from its report, “Fabricating Terrorism II,” which highlights the cases of 29 individuals who allege the complicity of MI5 and/or MI6 in their abuse, including one pre-9/11 case directly linked to Moazzam Begg.

Why the government has, to date, failed Shaker Aamer — and how the former prisoners made him central to their concerns

Just as significant as the government’s little-perceived acknowedgment of guilt is the unresolved question of what will happen to Shaker Aamer.

It is extraordinary enough to realize that he is being offered a settlement while he is still held in Guantánamo, but it is even more astonishing that, until the negotiations began, the government was unaware that all the former prisoners would tell ministers that they were unwilling to enter negotiations without confirmation that any deal would also include Shaker’s return to the UK.

The government apparently failed to understand that the bonds between Guantánamo prisoners run particularly deep, after their shared experiences, and that they all have great feelings of responsibility towards those left behind in Guantánamo — and especially towards Shaker, an intelligent, articulate and charismatic man, who, since his capture almost nine years ago, has fought tenaciously for the prisoners’ rights.

Ministers were duly taken aback when, one after another, the former prisoners explained that their intention had never been to seek financial compensation. They were, they said, motivated by a quest for justice, a desire to make sure that nothing that happened to them would be allowed to happen again, and an unassailable conviction that the entire process was useless while Shaker Aamer remained in Guantánamo.

Rather disturbingly, ministers also, apparently, failed to realize how little civil servants had done for the last few years to secure Shaker Aamer’s return from Guantánamo, and in one meeting there was a shocked silence from minsters, lawyers and the former prisoners when they admitted that they had not made a welfare visit to Shaker for five years.

They also, it seems, failed to realize how absurd it was to offer Shaker a settlement while he is still held in Guantánamo, and it also transpired that ministers had not been fully briefed about the fact that no inquiry can possibly proceed without him. This is not only because Shaker is the subject of one of the Metropolitan Police investigations, but also because the reason that investigation arose in the first place is because a court accepted, last December, his allegations that British agents had been present in a cell in the US prison at Kandahar in December 2001 when he was subjected to horrible abuse.

Although the British government, under Gordon Brown, asked for Shaker to be returned to the UK with four other British residents in August 2007, there has been no progress since that time, even though the other four men were safely returned in 2007 and 2009.

What Shaker Aamer knows

When prompted, the US goverment has claimed that it still has “security concerns” about Shaker, although these could obviously be dealt with by the British government if the political will existed to secure his return. Very possibly, this has been an excuse — mutually beneficial to both the US and UK governments — to put off having to deal with both the embarrassment, and with detailed revelations about the treatment of prisoners, which might be more damaging to both governments, when Shaker is eventually released.

The reason for this is that, in his fierce advocacy of rights for the prisoners held in the “War on Terror,” Shaker may know more than any other prisoner about the dark workings of Guantánamo and other prisons in Afghanistan. Soon after his capture he initiated a hunger strike to demand that prisoners be treated humanely, and in Guantánamo he not only supported and advised countless fellow prisoners, and liaised endlessly with the authorities, but also played a pivotal role in briefly bringing to an end a prison-wide hunger strike in the summer of 2005. On that occasion, he and five other influential prisoners were allowed to form a short-lived Prisoners’ Council, in an attempt to persuade the authorities to run the prison according to the Geneva Conventions, but when the authorities suddenly changed their minds and the council was disbanded, Shaker was thrown into solitary confinement, where he stayed for at least two years, on a hunger strike.

Moreover, it was during this period that three prisoners died, on June 9, 2006, and Shaker later told his lawyers that, on that same night, he had been tortured to within an inch of his life. His account added great weight to an article published in January this year, which, drawing on eye-witness accounts by soldiers who were stationed in Guantánamo on that particular night, demolished the authorities’ claim that the three men who died committed suicide, and indicated instead that they had been killed — either deliberately, or as part of a torture session in a secret facility outside Guantánamo that went too far.

Why Shaker Aamer must return to the UK now

According to the Guardian, Shaker “is expected to be allowed to return to the UK soon,” and I can only hope that this is true. As Moazzam Begg explained on Tuesday, “Shaker Aamer must now become a priority for this current government. The compensation paid to the former Guantánamo detainees is a welcome departure from the policies of the previous administration but in order to truly resolve the errors that have been made, Shaker Aamer must be returned back home to his family. We will do everything in our power to help this government achieve their goal of helping his return.”

In the last two days, the pressure for Shaker’s return has increased markedly. Although the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, said on Wednesday that the Crown Prosecution Service had advised the Metropolitan Police that, in their ongoing investigation into Binyam Mohamed’s case, there was insufficient evidence to prosecute the MI5 officer at the heart of the investgation (known as Witness B), “for any criminal offence arising from the interview of Binyam Mohamed in Pakistan on 17 May 2002,” Starmer added, “We are unable to release further information at this stage because the wider investigation into other potential criminal conduct arising from allegations made by Mr. Mohamed in interviews with the police is still ongoing.” Significantly, Starmer did not mention the ongoing investigation into the conduct of security service officials in Shaker Aamer’s case, but it is apparent that this particular investigation cannot conclude without Shaker Aamer being present to answer questions.

As a result of this investigation, and also, it should be noted, as a direct consequence of the settlement discussions, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, raised the question of Shaker Aamer’s return to the UK with Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, on Wednesday, marking the most high-profile mention of Shaker Aamer by a British government official since August 2007, when Gordon Brown asked for the return of the five remaining British residents.

This was a welcome development, and a clear reflection on the successful pressure exerted on the British government by the former prisoners, but Shaker’s return is not yet a done deal, and in the meantime anyone interested in securing Shaker Aamer’s return should besiege all available parties — David Cameron, William Hague, their local MPs and the US goverment — with demands for his return, pointing out that the Metropolitan Police’s investigation cannot conclude without him, and nor, indeed, can the goverment’s judicial inquiry begin.

Note: As part of Amnesty International’s new campaign for Shaker Aamer, readers can send a postcard to Daniel Fried, Obama’s Special Envoy on Guantánamo, who will hopefully receive many thousands of postcards demanding Shaker’s return (although, to be honest, I would cut the recommended text about the possibility of charging him promptly and giving him a fair trial), and can also write to MPs in the UK, who can be contacted easily and directly via the campaign page here. Also see this page for information about future screenings of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” the documentary film, co-directed by Polly Nash and myself, which features the story of Shaker Aamer — on November 22 in Oxford, on December 10 in Roehampton, on December 11 in Battersea, and on December 15 in Sheffield — and if you’re in London, or able to pay a visit, please also note that the screening on Saturday December 11, at the Battersea Arts Centre, is part of an event entitled, “A Day for Shaker Aamer,” organized by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign in his home borough of Wandsworth. The day begins at 12 noon, with a demonstration at Ponton Road, Nine Elms, London SW8, the site of the new US embassy. At 12.30 those gathered will march to Battersea Arts Centre for a public meeting, beginning at 2 pm, with speakers including Ken Livingstone, Moazzam Begg, Victoria Brittain, Jeremy Corbyn, Lindsey German, Kate Hudson, Gareth Peirce and Yvonne Ridley, and the film will be shown at 4.30 pm, followed by a Q&A with myself and Omar Deghayes.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners. Cross-posted on The Public Record, The World Can’t Wait and Uruknet.

The amounts to be paid will not be disclosed, but it has already been suggested that one payout will be more than a million pounds – related, no doubt, to the most horrific of all the cases: that of Binyam Mohamed, seized in Pakistan in April 2002, who was subjected to torture for two years in Pakistan, in Morocco and in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Kabul. In February this year, the Court of Appeal ordered the government to release documents — whose disclosure had been resisted for 18 months by foreign secretary David Miliband — demonstrating that British agents knew that their US counterparts were subjecting Mohamed to torture in Pakistan,  and, with the Metropolitan Police also investigating MI5′s role in Mohamed’s torture, and the existence of other information that has never been disclosed in court, it is understandable, frankly, that the government would seek to prevent any more dangerous disclosures in Mohamed’s case.

The announcement of the payments will no doubt cause a tsunami of outrage from the right-wing press, who will not be placated by the government’s argument that the continuation of the court case already initiated by these men, which has involved the government hiring at least 80 lawyers to examine half a million documents, would cost many times this amount (possibly as much as 50 million pounds). These critics will also, presumably, not even be swayed by the government’s national securtity argument: that. as the Guardian explained, “it is in the national interest that the cases are not brought to court so as to protect the security services methods from scrutiny.”

It is certainly true that even the limited disclosure of documents in summer, as a result of the court case, was troubling for the establishment. There was, for example, an FCO document from January 10, 2002, the day before Guantánamo opened, entitled, “Afghanistan UK Detainees,” which described the government’s “preferred options” in dealing with British prisoners. “Transfer of United Kingdom nationals held to a United States base in Guantánamo is the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objectives, to ensure they are securely held,” the document explained, adding that the “only alternative” was to either hold these men in British custody in Afghanistan, or to return them to the UK.

However, the most shocking revelations in the documents had more to do with former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had personally intervened to prevent Martin Mubanga, a British citizen seized in Zambia, from having consular access, and foreign secretary Jack Straw, who, in mid-January 2002, sent a telegram to several British diplomatic missions around the world in which he “signaled his agreement” with the Guantánamo policy, “but made clear that he did not wish to see the British nationals moved from Afghanistan before they could be interrogated.” In the telegram, he wrote:

A specialist team is currently in Afghanistan seeking to interview any detainees with a UK connection to obtain information on their terrorist activities and connections. We therefore hope that all those detainees they wish to interview will remain in Afghanistan and will not be among the first groups to be transferred to Guantánamo. A week’s delay should suffice. UK nationals should be transferred as soon as possible thereafter.

Nevertheless, the fear that the security services’ activities would be opened up to unparalleled scrutiny — when added to the fear of futher disclosures about government ministers and civil servants — ought to silence the critics, as these revelations are not merely embarrassing, but also suggest involvement with war crimes, for which those found to be complicit could face prosecution. For those wishing to avoid such an outcome, the most sensible approach is the one favoured by David Cameron — proceeding with the judicial inquiry into British complicity in the torture of prisoners abroad, which he announced in July, and whose intention, clearly, is to slap a few wrists, hide any damning evidence, and declare that a line can now be drawn under the whole affair.

As I know many of the released prisoners, and have witnessed the pain — and sometimes the horrors — that still haunt them, and that may never leave them, I cannot argue with their right to be compensated, having never received a penny either from the US government or from the British government, despite the involvement of both countries in their detention without charge or trial, their rendition, and their torture and abuse.

However, what particularly concerns me, in the run-up to the government’s official announcement, is what has been decided about Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, who was being ignored until some of the former prisoners — or perhaps all of them — suggested that they were not prepared to enter negotiations until his return from Guantánamo was guaranteed.

Although he was was cleared for release from Guantánamo in 2007, Shaker, who has a British wife and four British children, is still held, with both the British and the American governments blaming the other for his continued detention. The Americans claim to have “security issues,” which, if grounded in any reality at all (and this is itself doubtful), could easily be addressed by the British government, and the Americans occasionally point out, off the record, that the British could have him back easily if they were prepared to make enough of a fuss.

The shameful abandonment of Shaker Aamer is presumably because, as an intelligent, articulate and charismatic man who has been the foremost advocate of the rights of the prisoners in Guantánamo, he knows more than is comfortable about the dark workings of the prison (including the deaths of three prisoners in June 2006). However, holding onto Shaker has never been more than unjustly delaying the inevitable, and, in addition, his claims that he was abused in US custody in Afghanistan while British agents were present (which was the subject of a UK court case last year, leading to the launch of an investigation by the Metropolitan Police) means that it is unthinkable that any kind of inquiry can take place without him.

Most of all, however, the former prisoners look out for one another, and are bonded by their experience in a way that no one who has not been in Guantánamo can quite understand. Everyone who leaves the prison tells those left behind that he will do what he can for them, and while the fate of most of the remaining 174 prisoners is outside anyone’s control — even President Obama’s, either for sinister reasons, or because his critics, and supporters of Guantánamo in the US, are disturbingly infuential — the fate of Shaker Aamer is not, and I hope that today’s announcement will swiftly be followed by the arrival of a plane from Guantánamo bringing Shaker Aamer home.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Cross-posted on Common Dreams and The Public Record.