Organized by Oslo Dokumentarkino and the Human Rights House Network of human rights organizations, the festival, which is in its second year, took place in Parkteatret, a wonderful old theatre with an intimate atmosphere that made for a perfect venue. The festival began on Wednesday and ran through to Sunday, with packed houses throughout for a powerful programme put together by a group of committed, knowledgeable and very friendly activists, lawyers and human rights advocates.

Polly and I arrived in Oslo late on Friday afternoon, marvelling at the deep blanket of snow covering the entire country, and then made our way by tram to the venue (via our hotel), where we received a warm welcome from Sarah Prosser, one of the organizers, and managed to catch the last film of the day, “The Problem: Testimony of the Saharawi People,” a new documentary by Spanish directors Jordi Ferrer and Pablo Vidal. Combining undercover filming with archive material, the film revealed, unflinchingly, how, in the Western Sahara, abandoned by the Spanish in 1975 and then illegally occupied by Morocco, the Saharawi people are subjected to a brutal and little-known occupation, and how condemnation of the regime is stifled largely by Spain and France. Guided around the country by a veteran campaigner for the Saharawi people’s rights, who has been repeatedly imprisoned and tortured in the many “black prisons” maintained by the Moroccan government, the directors also interviewed two women activists who have been subjected to brutal torture.

Last summer, I received a crash-course in the history of the Moroccan government’s oppression of the Saharawi people at WOMAD, during and after an appearance by Mariem Hassan, an extraordinarily powerful singer and spokeswoman for the Saharawi people. Originally based in the El-Ayoun Refugee Camp in Algeria, one of four camps where around 165,000 displaced Saharawi have been living since 1976, Hassan now lives in exile. Although the directors of “The Problem” also visited the El-Ayoun camp, it is their footage from inside Western Sahara, and their encounters with peaceful opponents of the occupation, who wonder, pointedly, whether western governments only pay attention to violent resistance movements, that made the deepest impression on me. Further information about “The Problem” can be found here, on the official website.

On Saturday, Polly and I arrived at Parkteatret too late to see “Getting Justice: Kenya’s Deadly Game of Wait and See,” but we did manage to see most of “The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court,” a fascinating account of the development of the ICC, and its struggles to become established as the first ever international court to tackle war crimes and crimes against humanity. This was a gripping exploration of the long struggle to establish a global body capable of judging cases of genocide when national bodies fail to do so, whose origins can be traced back to the Nuremberg Trials and the founding of the United Nations, even though, of course, the project is being resisted by the US, China and Russia, all of whom have refused to recognize the ICC. Further information can be found on the film’s official website here.

In a panel discussion following the screening, chaired by Niels Jacob Harbitz of Human Rights House, Maina Kiai, Advocate of the High Court of Kenya, and the founding chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (who made “Getting Justice” with the Nairobi-based British director Lucy Hannan), discussed the ICC, accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and the current situation in Kenya with Nora Sveaass, Professor of Psychology at the University of Oslo and Norway’s representative on the UN Committee Against Torture, and Gunnar Ekeløve Slydal, Deputy Secretary General of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee, who participated in the establishment of the ICC. An interview with Maina Kiai is available here.

At 2.15, following a brief introduction by Polly and myself, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” was screened to a full house. The film was very well received, and was followed by the screening of a short film by the celebrated Norwegian journalist and filmmaker Erling Borgen, exposing Norway’s complicity in the crimes of the “War on Terror” through Aker Kværner, a company hired by the US military at Guantánamo to provide much of the prison’s infrastructure and technical support. Plans to prosecute Aker Kværner were stifled in the Norwegian courts, but in a panel discussion following the screenings, chaired by Borgen (who was also the festival’s first patron), Ståle Eskeland, Professor of Law at the University of Oslo, condemned the politicization of the legal process in this case, lamenting how it demonstrated that in Norway (as in so many other countries), terrorism was being used as an excuse to pretend that the rule of law no longer applies.

In a wide-ranging discussion, followed by a lively Q&A session, I also explained the problems facing President Obama as he tries to close Guantánamo (involving cowardice and compromise on the part of the administration, but also a right-wing propaganda machine that is out of control), described how complicity in the “War on Terror” involved the whole of Europe, and encouraged those attending the festival to put pressure on the Norwegian government to accept cleared prisoners from Guantánamo. To date, the Norwegian government has refused to join Belgium, France, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, Slovakia and Switzerland in accepting cleared prisoners, in order to help close Guantánamo — and to demonstrate a commitment to universal humanitarian principles — and I put forward the case that, as with other countries in Europe (including the UK), pressure should be exerted to accept prisoners as a kind of moral trade-off for complicity in the “War on Terror.” In Norway, this occurred not only through the actions of Aker Kværner, but also through the Norwegian government’s decision to turn a blind eye to US rendition flights through Norwegian territory. Although this may well have taken place as part of a NATO-wide agreement in October 2001 to provide unquestioning support to the Bush administration, it remains unacceptable that any country can be allowed to behave as through the rule of law was suspended in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

After this stimulating debate and Q&A session, Polly and I watched the last two films of the day. The first was “My Neighbour, My Killer,” which captured the sometimes disconcerting results of the Gacaca courts in Rwanda. These traditional local courts, established to deal with the 1994 genocide, function partly as a truth and reconciliation commission, and partly as a system for accountability, with what appears to be a fragile success, although it was disturbing that so little remorse was demonstrated by some of the accused. Further information can be found on the film’s official website here.

Following up on these themes, “Enemies of the People,” directed by Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, is an extraordinary new documentary addressing Cambodia’s “Killing Fields,” the genocide that took place under Pol Pot (“Brother No. 1”) and Nuon Chea (“Brother No. 2”). At the heart of the film is Sambath, whose family members were killed in the genocide, who embarked on a one-man mission to create a truth and reconciliation process in Cambodia. After spending ten years visiting Nuon Chea, and tracking down other former Khmer Rouge leaders further down the chain of command, Sambath succeeded in persuading Nuon Chea to speak about his responsibility for the genocide, and drew out the most extraordinary confessions from those who fulfilled the regime’s merciless aims. For further information about the film, see the official website here.

Afterwards, the organizers took the guests — myself, Polly, Maina Kiai, Lucy Hannan and Rob Lemkin — out to dinner, and afterwards we returned to the Parkteatret, magically transformed into a sweaty concert venue, for a “Balkan Beat Party” featuring an excellent Balkan band with a seven-piece horn section. It was a refreshing antidote to the often troubling messages of the day’s screenings, but although the party music was ringing in my head as Polly, Rob and I took a taxi back to the hotel at 2 am, it was difficult to escape the extraordinary intimacy of Thet Sambath’s encounters — not with Nuon Chea, whose warped idealism remained largely intact, but with the other Khmer Rouge murderers featured in “Enemies of the People”; ordinary men, haunted by their deeds, who demonstrated, it seemed to me, that contrition and forgiveness are amongst the most difficult tasks that we face as human beings.

My congratulations again to the organizers, and I only wish that I had another film lined up for next February. Instead, please see here for upcoming tour dates for “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” and, if you can read Norwegian, check out this newspaper article, based on a telephone interview with me, which appeared in Saturday’s edition of the Norwegian newspaper, Klassekampen.

(’’)

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). 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 January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Only last month, I tore into the mainstream media for abandoning all its fabled fact-checking and objectivity, when the Pentagon claimed, without producing any evidence whatsoever, that 1 in 5 prisoners freed from Guantánamo had “engaged in terrorist activity after their release,” and these claims were repeated as facts by numerous supposedly reputable media outlets.

As I explained at the time, this was just the latest installment in a campaign of misinformation, which, in May last year, led to humiliation for the New York Times, when its editors allowed a front-page story to run, claiming that 1 in 7 released prisoners (74 in total) had “returned to terrorism,” even though only 27 names were provided, and, of those, independent experts could only verify somewhere between 13 and 20 of them.

Last May, the Pentagon at least provided names, but last month’s fact-free assertions have now found their way to the White House, and were repeated on February 1 by John Brennan, the assistant to President Obama for homeland security and counterterrorism, in a letter to House Leader Nancy Pelosi, which was obtained by ABC News (PDF).

Brennan wrote that:

[T]he Intelligence Community assesses that 20 percent of detainees transferred from Guantánamo are confirmed or suspected of recidivist activity. This includes 9.6 percent of detainees who have been confirmed as having returned to terrorist activities, and 10.4 percent whom the Intelligence Community suspects, but is not certain, may have engaged in recidivist activities.

Brennan attempted to use these spurious figures to score points, asserting that all of the largely unidentified prisoners had been released by the Bush administration. Defending the Obama administration’s careful and thorough interagency review of the remaining prisoners’ cases, he wrote:

I want to underscore the fact that all of these cases relate to detainees released during the previous administration and under the prior detainee review process. The report indicates no confirmed or suspected recidivists among detainees transferred during this Administration, although we recognize the ongoing risk that detainees could engage in such activity.

Despite this, it frankly beggars belief that a spokesman for an administration that has pledged to close Guantánamo would publicly cleave to the kind of wretched propaganda that will make that task all but impossible.

So who are these approximately 116 men (out of the 532 prisoners released from Guantánamo under George W. Bush) who have allegedly “engaged in recidivist activities”?

We know, from earlier Pentagon claims, that this “recidivism” has included — and may well still include — publishing houses, the offices of newspapers, TV studios and film sets, because the Pentagon admitted (in a press release that was subsequently deleted from the Pentagon’s website, but is mirrored here) that it included former prisoners, like the Tipton Three — three young men from the West Midlands — who appeared in a film, “The Road to Guantánamo,” which dramatized their experiences, and the five Uighurs sent to Albania in 2006, after tribunals at Guantánamo cleared them of being “enemy combatants.” In the latter case, this was apparently because one of them, Abu Bakker Qassim, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in which he urged US lawmakers to defend habeas corpus.

In the years since, many more ex-prisoners have written books, newspaper articles and op-eds, and have appeared on TV and in films. Perhaps Omar Deghayes, the British resident (released in 2007), who appeared in the Guantánamo documentary that I co-directed, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” has now joined this ever-expanding group of “recidivists” who have dared to use their words and their voices to “attack” the United States for what it did to them in its brutal, experimental prisons in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere.

Clearly, however, the main thrust of this propaganda is directed not at these men, but at others — 70, 80, 90 men, perhaps — who have supposedly engaged in terrorism since their release.

Is this plausible? In a word, no.

Even the most rampant apologists for the lawless regime created by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have never realistically tried to claim that more than a dozen or so Saudis slipped through the Saudi government’s rehabilitation program with their burning hatred of America still intact. Moreover, once a handful of other regularly cited names have been dealt with, and it becomes apparent that no “recidivists” have emerged from a vast array of countries — throughout Europe, North Africa and the Gulf — the only conclusion that a logical analyst can reach is that this vast and largely undefined number of “recidivists” must include as many as 1 in 3 of all the Afghans who were ever held.

This, to be honest, is no less preposterous, as only a handful of Taliban commanders (released through the Pentagon’s own ineptitude) were mistakenly freed from Guantánamo, but it at least has the benefit of a certain amount of logic, in that men repatriated to a country still occupied by a foreign army that is as useless at rounding up “terrorists” as it was eight years ago, may find a reason to resist the occupier on their doorstep, even if they have never been near a “battlefield” before.

Even this, however, presupposes that the Pentagon’s “facts” and “suspicions” are remotely accurate, and as researchers — particularly those at the Seton Hall Law School, who have relentlessly analyzed the repeated claims of recidivism — have demonstrated time and again (PDF), the propaganda does not stand up to any form of scrutiny. John Brennan may be at liberty to talk about a few dozen released prisoners who have “engaged in recidivism,” but entertaining the prospect that this figure could be as high as 116 is, to put it frankly, either a dereliction of duty, or a sign that he has fallen under the sway of Dick Cheney’s still malevolent influence.

To understand how easy it is for credulous officials to fall for this propaganda, I’d like to take you back to last month, when Senator Dianne Feinstein, who, laughably, is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, falsely claimed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that “about a third of former inmates at the US naval base who have returned to fight against US interests come from Yemen,” as AFP described it. “If you look at Yemen, and we’re taking a good look at Yemen,” Feinstein said, “what you see is, I think, at least 24 or 28 are confirmed returned to the battlefield in Yemen, and a number are suspected. If you combine the suspected and the confirmed, the number I have is 74 detainees have gone back into the fight, and I think that’s bad.”

It was a poor day for the Senate’s “intelligence” when Feinstein (drawing on the May report) made this ridiculous statement. Its most baleful effect was to add a deceptive veneer of acceptability to the pressure exerted on President Obama to suspend the release of any more cleared Yemeni prisoners at Guantánamo, for one simple reason: only 16 Yemeni prisoners were released from Guantánamo between 2004 and November 2009, and only one of these men allegedly became involved in terrorism.

But in this new world of groundless hysteria, which seems to reveal only how the baleful reach of the Pentagon’s scaremongering has finally engulfed the White House, no one cares that Feinstein couldn’t even get her facts straight.

With John Brennan embracing the lie that 116 of the 532 men released from Guantánamo between 2002 and January 2009 have “engaged in recidivist activities” — and with a compliant and complacent mainstream media happy to regurgitate such rubbish without asking for facts — it may as well be true, as Feinstein claimed, that 28 of the 16 Yemenis returned from Guantánamo have become terrorists.

Once upon a time, we used to pride ourselves on making policy decisions based on facts, rather than on the propaganda that was so prevalent in totalitarian regimes. Now, however, we might as well give up all pretense that this is the case. Just as people were tortured in Guantánamo to produce false confessions that could be used in show trials, like every other totalitarian regime, representatives of the US government now attempt to scare and intimidate the American public with “facts” about “recidivism” that have no basis in reality. In 2010, fear blinds reason, and the truth, it seems, is irrelevant.

(’’)

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). 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 January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

I wrote about the Military Commissions appeal in “Lawyers Appeal Guantánamo Trial Convictions,” which covers in depth what Jeff and I discussed, focusing primarily on whether it was legitimate to try (and convict) Hamdan and al-Bahlul on charges of supporting material support to terrorism, which even the Obama administration believes may be overturned on appeal. In al-Bahlul’s case, he was also convicted on a conspiracy charge, but what makes his case most alarming is that he was convicted (on the eve of 2008 Presidential election) in a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defense, and received a life sentence, which he is now serving in isolation in Guantánamo. Disturbingly, he will remain there, while Guantánamo closes around him, unless the government presses for legislation to move him to a prison on the US mainland.

Jeff and I also discussed how inadvisable it was for the Obama administration to revive the Commissions, given their lamentably poor history under the Bush administration, and their reemergence as what appears to be part of a three-tier quasi-judicial system, involving federal court trials for some prisoners (when the evidence appears to be secure), Military Commissions (when it is less reliable), and, most shockingly, indefinite detention without charge or trial in 50 cases in which the government has no reliable evidence whatsoever.

We also discussed the case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was seized in Afghanistan when he was just 15 years old, following a recent ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court, in which Canada’s most important judicial body ruled that the Canadian government violated Khadr’s rights when it sent interrogators to question him at Guantánamo, but failed to order the government to demand his repatriation.

This discussion allowed me to lament Canada’s continuing indifference and hypocrisy regarding Khadr, and also to criticize the Obama administration for reviving his trial by Military Commission. With regard to Canada, I pointed out that the government’s position is particularly hypocritical because the country has done so much to promote the rights of child soldiers in other conflicts, but has been content to abandon one of its own citizens.

Analyzing the US position, I pointed out that it was always unforgivable that the Bush administration chose to prosecute a child soldier, even before the hidden evidence emerged which demonstrates that Khadr was unconscious and buried under a pile of rubble when he allegedly threw a grenade that killed a US soldier. I added that it was deeply distressing that the Obama administration has revived the prosecution, and has failed to realize not only that prosecuting a former juvenile prisoner in a war crimes trial will attract international criticism, but also that it repeats the Bush administration’s unjustifiable claims that, in armed conflict, those who fight for the US are soldiers, but those who oppose them are war criminals and terrorists.

Jeff and I also talked about Bagram, following up on the recent publication of my annotated prisoner list (which, in turn, followed the publication of the first ever prisoner list, obtained by the ACLU), and two accompanying articles, “Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List,” and “UN Secret Detention Report Asks, ‘Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?,’” analyzing the list and an important new UN report on secret detention, which includes a detailed account of the US secret detention program under George W. Bush. Shortly after the interview, I also published another article, “Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions,” which looks at how President Obama has failed to revive the Geneva Conventions regarding the detention of prisoners in wartime, and which also provides new information about other secret prisons in Afghanistan.

After running through the vile — and violent — history of Bagram, where several men were murdered in US custody in 2002, I discussed Bagram’s more recent history, covering the cases of the three men rendered to Bagram from other countries who won habeas corpus petitions last year (in a ruling which has been challenged by the Obama administration) and explaining how I researched the names on the list made available by the Pentagon, with the intention of discovering what happened to the many dozens of foreign prisoners held at Bagram, who are not listed. I also explained that I hope to encourage other people who have information about Bagram to come forward to provide further details about those who are still held — and those who have disappeared — so that I can update the list as a collaborative project, and can continue to expose the disturbing truth about US detention policies in Afghanistan.

As I also explained, the importance of exposing the truth about Bagram and secret prisons in Afghanistan is not just because of the ongoing need for accountability for crimes committed by the Bush administration, but also because of increasing evidence that current US detention policy in Afghanistan remains a disturbingly gray area in the Obama administration’s policies.

There was much more in the interview, which lasts for about 35 minutes (including an analysis of Glenn Greenwald’s important article about the seemingly permanent right-wing drift in American consciousness regarding terrorism), and I look forward to talking to Jeff again in the near future.

(’’)

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). 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 January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

I also explained the use of a secret facility within Bagram as part of a network of secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, and asked pointed questions about the whereabouts of a number of men, known to have been held in secret prisons in Afghanistan, who are not on the list and whose apparent disappearance has never been explained — and also covered this topic in another recent article, “UN Secret Detention Report Asks, ‘Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?’”

In this second article based on the prisoner list, I look specifically at Bagram as a prison in a war zone, examining the murky relationship between the US and Afghan authorities regarding the detention of prisoners in wartime, asking whether the prison under President Obama conforms to the Geneva Conventions, and exposing new information about a network of secret prisons in forward operating bases and other locations around the country.

For those who fear that there are hundreds of prisoners in Bagram who have been have been held for many years, it should be noted that the limited information provided by the list is somewhat reassuring. Of the 645 prisoners listed, all but a hundred or so were seized in the last two years. There is a caveat, however. Based on the numbering system used, it appears that a total of 3,000 prisoners have been held at Bagram since the last of the regular prisoners was transferred to Guantánamo in November 2003, but although some have been freed — as part of an essentially inscrutable review process — it is not known how many others have been transferred either to Afghan custody (under a similarly inscrutable arrangement) or to Block “D” of Kabul’s main prison, Pol-i-Charki.

Refurbished by US forces in early 2007, Block “D” is where 45 of the 46 Afghan prisoners repatriated from Guantánamo since August 2007 have ended up. The one exception is Mohamed Jawad, released last August, who won his habeas corpus petition in a US court, but the other 45 have been subjected to equally opaque policies regarding their continued detention, and decisions about whether they should be tried or released, and, if the former, whether trials should be based on anything other than dubious “evidence” recycled from Guantánamo. The overriding question about Block “D” — which lawyers are hoping to test in US courts following the recent transfer of four Afghans from Guantánamo — is whether Block “D” is under Afghan or American control.

Despite these small reassurances about Bagram, I would not like to give the impression that all is well with the prison. The length of time that the majority of the 645 men have been held may appear to be quite reasonable — between one and two years — but this is supposed to be a prison in a war zone, and those detained should be screened on capture to make sure that they have not been seized by mistake, and then held for the duration of hostilities. Instead, there is every indication that prisoners are, in general, seized according to the defining characteristics of the “War on Terror,” as played out in both Iraq and Afghanistan — indiscriminate dragnets and raids based on often dubious intelligence — which not only fail to win “hearts and minds,” but also demonstrate a unilateral (and illegal) reworking of the Geneva Conventions.

The Geneva Conventions and the prevention of torture

If there is any doubt about a wartime prisoner’s status — because he is not wearing a uniform, for example — he is entitled to an Article 5 competent tribunal, held close to the time and place of capture, at which he can call witnesses. The US military pioneered these tribunals from Vietnam onwards, and was preparing to undertake them in December 2001, when the prisons at Kandahar and Bagram opened, until the orders came from on high that, in the “War on Terror,” they were unnecessary. In its extraordinary arrogance and contempt for the law, the Bush administration decided that no screening was required, and that it was sufficient for the President to declare that, on capture, all the men were “enemy combatants,” who could be held indefinitely without any rights whatsoever.

The purpose — as became apparent at Guantánamo, when President Bush declared that the Geneva Conventions did not extend to those held in the “War on Terror” — was not to keep men off the battlefield for the duration of hostilities, but to provide the lawless conditions in which they could be interrogated for “actionable intelligence.” The result, as has been chronicled as Guantánamo, at Bagram, at Abu Ghraib and in the secret prison network, was a torture regime, purportedly sanctioned by memos written by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which claimed to redefine torture for the use by the CIA, or, in the case of the military, through “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for use at Guantánamo, which later migrated to Iraq.

In many ways, these techniques were first conceived at Bagram, where the use of sleep deprivation and brutal stress positions (the “strappado” technique, or “Palestinian hanging”) was widespread, and the regime was so brutal that, in 2002, at least two prisoners (and possibly as many as five) were murdered in US custody.

Despite official claims that the conditions at Bagram have improved in the years since, a BBC report in June 2008, based on interviews with men held in the prison between 2002 and 2008, found that only two “said they had been treated well,” while the rest complained that “they were beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs.” In “Undue Process” (PDF), a Human Rights First report published in November 2009, a distinction was made between those held in Bagram’s early years, and those held since 2006, when, as the report noted, ex-detainees “described significantly better treatment than those captured earlier, but some still told of being assaulted at the point of capture and being held in cold isolation cells for several weeks after their capture.”

Moreover, in October 2009, during a panel discussion following the launch of the new Guantánamo documentary, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” former prisoner Omar Deghayes explained how his Pakistani brother-in-law was recently captured on a visit to Afghanistan and ended up in Bagram. As Omar described it, his brother-in-law’s wife, who was allowed to talk to her husband through a videophone system established by the International Committee of the Red Cross in early 2008, reported “how horribly and badly tortured he was, how he had marks on his eyes and was really badly battered.”

Importing Guantánamo-style reviews to Bagram

In an attempt to stifle dissent — and, it seems, as part of a cynical maneuver to encourage the Court of Appeals to reverse the habeas victories last March of the three foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries — the Obama administration announced last September that it was introducing a new review process for the Bagram prisoners. Submitted in court documents relating to the government’s appeal (PDF), the proposals allowed, for the first time, prisoners to call witnesses in their defense.

This was an improvement, because, until 2007, there was no formal review process at all, and as District Court Judge John D. Bates noted last March, when he granted the habeas corpus petitions of the three foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram, the system that was then put in place — consisting of Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Boards — “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo” (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, the one-sided review process convened in 2004-05, which the Supreme Court found inadequate in Boumediene v. Bush, the June 2008 ruling granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights).

With incredulity, Judge Bates noted that the Bagram prisoners are not even allocated a personal representative from the military, as happened during the CSRTs at Guantánamo, and also noted that, although they are allowed to represent themselves:

Detainees cannot even speak for themselves; they are only permitted to submit a written statement. But in submitting that statement, detainees do not know what evidence the United States relies upon to justify an “enemy combatant” designation — so they lack a meaningful opportunity to rebut that evidence. [The government’s] far-reaching and ever-changing definition of enemy combatant, coupled with the uncertain evidentiary standards, further undercut the reliability of the UECRB review. And, unlike the CSRT process [which was followed by annual review boards], Bagram detainees receive no review beyond the UECRB itself.

In what appeared to be a direct response to Judge Bates’ damning criticisms, the Obama administration announced that, under the new rules, each prisoner would be assigned a US military official to represent him (as happened at Guantánamo), and that prisoners would also have the right to call witnesses and present evidence when it is “reasonably available” (as also happened at Guantánamo, even though no foreign witness was ever summoned to Cuba to testify).

It was also announced that the boards would determine whether prisoners should be held by the United States, turned over to Afghan authorities or released, but although the proposals included a promise that, “For those ordered held longer, the process will be repeated at six-month intervals,” the unilateral flight from the Geneva Conventions was confirmed not only in the decision to export Guantánamo’s discredited tribunal system to Bagram, but also in a section detailing how prisoners would be treated on capture.

As the submission explained, new prisoners would be subjected, on capture, not to Article 5 tribunals, but to cursory reviews by “the capturing unit commander” and by the commander of Bagram to ascertain that they “meet the criteria for detention.” Moreover, the DoD insisted that it was not merely holding prisoners “consistent with the laws and customs of war,” but was also holding those who fulfill the criteria laid down in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (the founding document of the “War on Terror,” approved by Congress within days of the 9/11 attacks), which authorized the President to detain those who “planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,” or those who supported them.

This is depressingly close to the “new paradigm” of warfare introduced by Bush and Cheney, and it is, perhaps, no surprise that, as criticisms began to mount, the administration strategically announced that it was in the process of transferring control of Bagram to the Afghan government. It remains to be seen how swiftly the proposed transfer will occur, but it is unsurprising that the announcement has been made, for two reasons: firstly, because it diverts attention from current US policy, and secondly, because, as with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in Iraq, it allows the US government to abdicate all responsibility for the mistakes it has made. Signed in November 2008, the SOFA in Iraq has led to the transfer of thousands of prisoners in US control to the custody of the Iraqi government, even though what awaits them is not a review of whether their detention by US forces was a mistake, but the chaos of the Iraqi judicial system.

Secret prisons

This is disturbingly cynical, of course, but what makes it even worse is a reasonable assumption that the transfer of Bagram to Afghan control will not include the transfer of any prisoners regarded as significant. For these men, the likelihood is that the US government will retain control of a secretive “black jail” within Bagram airbase, exposed by the Washington Post and the New York Times in November 2009, and will continue to seize men in nighttime raids, sending them either to this facility, or to one of nine “Field Detention Sites” on military bases, “often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families,” as Anand Gopal reported in a ground-breaking exposé last week, which revealed the extensive torture and abuse of those held.

Gopal’s account is not the only insight into the dark realities of current US detention policies in Afghanistan, beyond Bagram, beyond the Geneva Conventions, and, it seems, beyond the law. Late last year, a reliable Afghan source informed a lawyer friend of mine that there were, at the time, about two dozen secret facilities in Afghanistan, including three or four in Herat, four or five in northern Afghanistan, and three or four in Kabul. According to this source, the majority were US facilities, although a few were run by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan government’s domestic intelligence agency, and a few others were run by the Afghan Army. The source added, “They are all worse than Bagram. All contain a mix of combatants, criminals, and totally innocent persons. The main difference is that those at the US prisons are fed better. No one has any rights.”

In addition, just last week, in response to my recent articles, a military insider let me know that, “Not only were there facilities in Bagram, but in Kandahar and Salerno as well. Saw them first-hand between 2006 and 2009, but was told not to speak of the jails.” These, it was noted, were “unsanctioned facilities,” which were off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

As eight years of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should have taught us, once you abandon the Geneva Conventions, all that lies beyond is secrecy and torture. The Obama administration has certainly tinkered with the Bush administration’s legacy, but as the stories of Bagram, the “dark jail” and the network of secret facilities demonstrates, tinkering threatens only to drive the dark truths further underground, and what is needed is the courage to thoroughly repudiate the brutal practices at the heart of the “War on Terror.”

A slightly edited version of this article was published exclusively on Truthout.

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). 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 January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The two men in question — Arkin Mahmud, 45, and his brother Bahtiyar Mahnut, 32 — were seized with 20 other Uighurs in December 2001. The US authorities realized almost immediately that all of these men, who are Turkic Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and had been seized (or bought) by mistake. However, although the majority of the men were cleared for release by 2005, the Bush administration accepted that it could not return them to China, because of fears that they would face torture or other ill-treatment, but then struggled to find another country that would take them instead.

In May 2006, Albania was persuaded to take five of these men, but the other 17 had to wait until October 2008, when Judge Ricardo Urbina, a US District Court judge, ruled on their long-delayed habeas corpus petitions, and ordered their release into the United States, because no other country had been found that would take them, and because their continued detention was unconstitutional.

Predictably, the Bush administration appealed, and in February 2010 the Obama administration, to its eternal shame, followed suit, backing a ruling by the Court of Appeals, which overturned the lower court ruling, and hurled the Uighurs back into limbo.

In June 2009, the State Department managed to find new homes for four of these men in Bermuda, and in November the Pacific island of Palau took another six. As a result, seven Uighurs remained in Guantánamo, but by taking the brothers, the Swiss government has not only dared to take on the might of the Chinese government, which threatens any country that dares to entertain the prospect of taking any of the men from Guantánamo, but has also helped President Obama out of what appeared to be an intractable problem.

In a statement, the Swiss Justice Ministry said, “Today the Federal Council decided to admit for humanitarian reasons two Uighurs with Chinese citizenship, who have been imprisoned in Guantánamo for years by the United States without being charged with a crime nor [convicted].” Brushing aside the threats that the Chinese government had made last month, when Chinese officials warned that Switzerland should avoid damaging “overall Sino-Swiss relations,” the Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf added that Switzerland has a “stable, good relationship with China, and we want to keep it that way.”

Not mentioned publicly was the fact that, until Jura accepted the men’s asylum claims, one of them, Arkin Mahmud, appeared to stuck at Guantánamo, his only way out being to hope that the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the Uighurs’ case last year, would overturn last February’s appeals court ruling, and allow cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated into the United States.

The problem is that Palau had refused to take Arkin Mahmud, because, as the Washington Post noted in an editorial in October, he “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement.” As a result, Bahtiyar Mahnut turned down Palau’s offer of a new home for himself, in order to stay with his brother, and, as the Post noted, “Unless another country accepts the brothers, they could remain in custody indefinitely — a prospect that is unconscionable and that no doubt informed the justices’ decision to hear the matter.”

As I explained in an article at the time:

[T]he Supreme Court was faced with a tricky legal decision, because the justices will be considering whether, in defense of habeas corpus, and in reference to the unique position in which the Guantánamo prisoners are held, they are being asked to decide whether a judge has the power to order the release of prisoners into the US, when all the precedents, as the Court of Appeals made clear, establish that the admission of foreigners into the US is a matter for the executive and legislative branches of government.

At the time, the Post reached a principled conclusion with profound implications for the government, arguing that the “moral and ethical imperatives” were “clear and compelling,” and that the government should introduce “narrowly crafted legislation that would allow Mr. Mahmud and Mr. Mahnut into the United States, where they could remain together and Mr. Mahmud could get the medical help he needs.”

This “narrowly crafted legislation” will not now be needed, but it remains to be seen if the imminent release of Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut will affect the Supreme Court’s planned deliberations about the remaining five Uighurs.

The Supreme Court has scheduled argument for March 23 to decide whether to overturn the precedents regarding the admission of foreigners into the US, when, as in the cases of the Uighurs, these men are held in Guantánamo because it is not safe to repatriate them, and no other nation will take them.

The men’s lawyers will argue, as they have consistently, that the Supreme Court ruling in June 2008, granting constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights to the prisoners, is meaningless if a judge cannot actually order prisoners to be released.

As the Associated Press explained on Wednesday, the government could now try to argue that the Supreme Court should drop the case, because the remaining Uighurs were apparently offered new homes in Palau but turned down the offer. Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel at The Constitution Project, told the AP that she feared this outcome. “I would not be surprised,” she said, “if the administration says that the Uighurs themselves are at fault that they have not been resettled to Palau.”

However, Sabin Willett, an attorney who has represented the Uighurs for many years, was more hopeful, telling the AP by email that he “expects the case to go forward.” I tend to share Willett’s optimism, but not, of course, if the remaining five men are miraculously resettled in some other country, perhaps just days before the March 23 deadline.

If there is one thing we have learned from the Obama administration, since the President shelved plans made last April by his counsel, Greg Craig, to bring the Uighurs to live in the US, it is that, regardless of whether senior officials may agree in private that resettling the Uighurs in the US would be the right thing to do, they are not prepared to tackle their critics — and the Bush administration’s poisonous legacy — head-on. Instead, senior officials prefer not only to avoid confrontation, but also, sadly, to avoid doing anything that would demonstrate to the American public that enormous mistakes were made at Guantánamo, and that the rhetoric of Dick Cheney and his thriving acolytes is disturbingly mistaken.

I can think of no finer way to demonstrate this than to allow the Uighurs to walk free on the streets of, say, Washington D.C., but it remains clear that this is not something that the administration will undertake willingly, and in the meantime, the people of Bermuda and Palau have been learning this instead, and are soon to be joined by the people of Switzerland.

President Obama is fortunate to have such kind allies, but he himself is the loser, the longer he refuses to tackle those who insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that everyone who was held at Guantánamo was a “terrorist,” and that it is somehow appropriate to continue to deprive innocent men of their liberty in Guantánamo, rather than giving them new homes in the country that, through cruelty and incompetence, deprived them of so many years of their lives.

(’’)

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). 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 January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

For a sequence of articles dealing with the Uighurs in Guantánamo, see: The Guantánamo whistleblower, a Libyan shopkeeper, some Chinese Muslims and a desperate government (July 2007), Guantánamo’s Uyghurs: Stranded in Albania (October 2007), Former Guantánamo detainee seeks asylum in Sweden (November 2007), A transcript of Sabin Willett’s speech in Stockholm (November 2007), Support for ex-Guantánamo detainee’s Swedish asylum claim (January 2008), A Chinese Muslim’s desperate plea from Guantánamo (March 2008), Former Guantánamo prisoner denied asylum in Sweden (June 2008), Six Years Late, Court Throws Out Guantánamo Case (June 2008), Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland (July 2008), From Guantánamo to the United States: The Story of the Wrongly Imprisoned Uighurs (October 2008), Guantánamo Uyghurs’ resettlement prospects skewered by Justice Department lies (October 2008), A Pastor’s Plea for the Guantánamo Uyghurs (October 2008), Guantánamo: Justice Delayed or Justice Denied? (October 2008), Sabin Willett’s letter to the Justice Department (November 2008), Will Europe Take The Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners? (December 2008), A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs (January 2009), Guantanamo’s refugees (February 2009), Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (February 2009), A Letter To Barack Obama From A Guantánamo Uighur (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (May 2009), Guantánamo: A Real Uyghur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity (May 2009), Free The Guantánamo Uighurs! (May 2009), Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda? (June 2009), Guantánamo’s Uighurs In Bermuda: Interviews And New Photos (June 2009), Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now! (June 2009), Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies (July 2009), Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China? (July 2009), Chair Of The American Conservative Union Supports The Guantánamo Uighurs (July 2009), Three Uighurs Talk About Chinese Interrogation At Guantánamo (July 2009), House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo (July 2009), A Profile of Rushan Abbas, The Guantánamo Uighurs’ Interpreter (August 2009), A Plea To Barack Obama From The Guantánamo Uighurs (August 2009), Court Allows Return Of Guantánamo Prisoners To Torture (September 2009), Finding New Homes For 44 Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners (October 2009), Justice At Last? Guantánamo Uighurs Ask Supreme Court For Release Into US (October 2009), Senate Finally Allows Guantánamo Trials In US, But Not Homes For Innocent Men (October 2009), Six Uighurs Go To Palau; Seven Remain In Guantánamo (October 2009), Who Are The Six Uighurs Released From Guantánamo To Palau? (November 2009), Guantánamo Uighurs In Palau: First Interview And Photo (November 2009), Guantánamo: Idealists Leave Obama’s Sinking Ship (December 2009), and the stories in the additional chapters of The Guantánamo Files: Website Extras 1, Website Extras 6 and Website Extras 9.

Please support my work!

For four years, I have been providing detailed information about the prisoners in Guantánamo, first through my book The Guantánamo Files, which tells the story of the prison and around 450 of the prisoners held, and then through 12 online chapters, which provide information about the majority of the other 329 prisoners. Alongside this project, I have been working assiduously as a full-time independent journalist, covering stories as they develop, and focusing in particular on the stories of released prisoners, the Military Commission trial system, and the prisoners’ progress in the courts, through their habeas corpus petitions.

My intention, all along, has been to bring the men to life through their stories, dispelling the Bush administration’s rhetoric about the prison holding “the worst of the worst,” and demonstrating how, instead, the majority of the prisoners were either innocent men, seized by the US military’s allies at a time when bounty payments were widespread, or recruits for the Taliban, who had been encouraged by supporters in their homelands to help the Taliban in a long-running inter-Muslim civil war (with the Northern Alliance), which began long before the 9/11 attacks and, for the most part, had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism. As I explained in the introduction to my four-part Definitive Prisoner List (updated on January 1), I remain convinced, through detailed research and through comments from insiders with knowledge of Guantánamo, that “at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total” had no involvement with terrorism.

However, as this is a blog, rather than a website, I recognize that it’s increasingly difficult to navigate, as there are so many “Categories,” and, most crucially, there is no access to articles in anything other than reverse chronological order. In an attempt to remedy this shortcoming, and to provide easy access to the most important articles on the site, I’ve put together five chronological lists, covering the periods May to December 2007, January to June 2008, July to December 2008, January to June 2009 and July to December 2009, in the hope that they will provide a useful tool for navigation.

In this final part (for now, pending an update this summer), I continued writing for the Guardian, the Future of Freedom Foundation and Cageprisoners, and was also thrilled to be asked to start writing regularly for Truthout. I also maintained my involvement with the Huffington Post, CounterPunch, Antiwar.com, AlterNet and ZNet, and also kept up contact with the Daily Star, Lebanon. A number of other sites also started regularly cross-posting my articles, including Jason Leopold’s The Public Record, and I also made a number of appearances on al-Jazeera and Democracy Now!

In terms of content, this was the period when, distressingly, the high hopes human rights activists had for President Obama began to unravel. I covered some spectacular testimony in Congress, when Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld and Maj. David Frakt did their utmost to prevent the revival of the Military Commissions, but then watched in horror as the Commissions were revived in November, in a three-tier system of “justice” that involved federal court trials for some prisoners, Military Commissions for others, and, most alarmingly, indefinite detention without charge or trial for others. In September, the administration dropped its plans to apply for new legislation to endorse this disturbing plan, but ended up claiming that it needed only to rely on the sweeping and open-ended power that Congress granted George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which, to be frank, are in drastic need of an overhaul.

I also covered the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions in great detail, rounding up the stories to date in a three-parter in the summer, cheering as Judge Ellen Huvelle granted the habeas petition of the former juvenile prisoner (and torture victim) Mohamed Jawad, and then reeling in shock as Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted the habeas petition of a Kuwaiti, Fouad al-Rabiah, and revealed, in her ruling, how he had been tortured into making false confessions that he had then repeated in publicly-available documents. This was one of my most successful articles of the period, along with a two-part interview with Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, formerly Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff.

I also covered the stories of the 31 prisoners released between July and December, continued to monitor Binyam Mohamed’s ongoing UK court case regarding his “extraordinary rendition” and torture, maintained a regular commentary on the UK’s domestic anti-terror laws, exposed what is known to date about murders in US custody in Afghanistan, and, in September, focused on the Obama administration’s shameless attempts to maintain Bush-era secrecy at Bagram, and to introduce a review process, unrelated to the Geneva Conventions, which was essentially copied from the discredited system used at Guantánamo.

In addition, I branched out into film, with the launch of a new documentary film, “Outside the law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by filmmaker Polly Nash and myself) in October, which I then followed up with a short US tour, taking in New York, Fairfax, Virginia, Washington D.C., and the Bay Area. The film was later featured on Democracy Now!, ABC News and Truthout, and although I had a great time in the States, and met some wonderful people, I couldn’t help thinking that the hopes of January 2009 were being dashed, with right-wingers out of control, members of Obama’s own party demonstrating their own stupidity, and a voter base that was either blind to reality, believing that Obama had waved a magic wand and made everything fine, or thoroughly disillusioned and comparing him to George W. Bush. In several articles, I expressed my disgust with lawmakers of both parties, and also my disappointment that, when it came to being challenged, the Obama administration chose cowardice, and acted with pragmatism rather than with the principles that are so desperately needed if the crimes of the Bush administration are ever to be thoroughly repudiated.

An archive of Guantánamo articles: Part Five, July to December 2009

July 2009

1. Murders in US custody: When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan
2. Torture: Release Of The “Holy Grail” Of Torture Reports Delayed Again
3. Federal court trials: African Embassy Bombing Suspect To Face Trial In September 2010 (Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani)
4. UK anti-terror laws: Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws
5. UK anti-terror laws: “Would you be able to cope?”: Letters by the children of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh
6. UK anti-terror laws: Control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh to be allowed to leave the UK
7. Bagram: Judge Rules That Afghan “Rendered” To Bagram In 2002 Has No Rights
8. Military Commissions: Military Commissions: Government Flounders, As Admiral Hutson Nails Problems
9. UK torture: Britain’s Secret Torture Policy Exposed
10. UK torture: How David Davis Exposed Britain’s Secret Torture Scandal
11. Military Commissions: Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions (Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld)
12. UK anti-terror laws: Testing control orders (in the Guardian)
13. Torture: Will Eric Holder Be The Anti-Torture Hero?
14. Afghanistan: The Convoy of Death: Will Obama Investigate The Afghan Massacre Of November 2001?
15. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Guantánamo And The Courts (Part One): Exposing The Bush Administration’s Lies
16. China: Is The World Ignoring A Massacre of Uighurs In China?
17. Uighur prisoners: Chair Of The American Conservative Union Supports The Guantánamo Uighurs
18. UK anti-terror laws: Dismantle the secret state (in the Guardian)
19. Tunisian prisoners: Italy’s Guantánamo: Obama Plans “Rendition” Of Tunisians In Guantánamo To Italian Jail
20. Military Commissions: Predictable Chaos As Guantánamo Trials Resume
21. UK anti-terror laws: UK government issues travel document to control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh after horrific suicide attempt
22. Uighur prisoners: Three Uighurs Talk About Chinese Interrogation At Guantánamo
23. Uighur prisoners: House Threatens Obama Over Chinese Interrogation Of Uighurs In Guantánamo
24. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Obama’s Failure To Deliver Justice To The Last Tajik In Guantánamo (Umar Abdulayev)
25. Interviews: An interview with Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files (July 2009)
26. Video: Andy Worthington discusses the closure of Guantánamo on Al-Jazeera
27. Closing Guantánamo: Obama And The Deadline For Closing Guantánamo: It’s Worse Than You Think
28. Torture: US Torture Under Scrutiny In British Courts
29. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: How Judge Huvelle Humiliated The Government In Guantánamo Case (Mohamed Jawad)
30. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: As Judge Orders Release Of Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner, Government Refuses To Concede Defeat (Mohamed Jawad)

August 2009

31. Video: Former prisoners launch the Guantánamo Justice Centre in London
32. Closing Guantánamo: Guantánamo As Hotel California: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like, But You Can Never Leave
33. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Charity Worker (Khalid al-Mutairi)
34. UK anti-terror laws: Secret evidence in the case of the North West 10 “terror suspects”
35. Binyam Mohamed: What The British Government Knew About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed
36: Uighur prisoners: A Profile of Rushan Abbas, The Guantánamo Uighurs’ Interpreter
37. Uighur prisoners: A Plea To Barack Obama From The Guantánamo Uighurs
38. Military Commissions: David Frakt: Military Commissions “A Catastrophic Failure”
39. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Two): Obama’s Shame
40. Closing Guantánamo: Guantánamo In Belgium: The Questionable Fate Of Two Tunisians
41. Bagram: Bagram Isn’t The New Guantánamo, It’s The Old Guantánamo
42. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Guantánamo And The Courts (Part Three): Obama’s Continuing Shame
43. Guantánamo history: Arrogance And Torture: A History of Guantánamo
44. Interviews: An Interview With Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Part One)

September 2009

45. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Reflections On Mohamed Jawad’s Release From Guantánamo
46. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are The Two Syrians Released From Guantánamo To Portugal?
47. UK anti-terror laws: Letting go of control orders (in the Guardian)
48. Torture: Spanish judge resumes torture case against six senior Bush lawyers
49. Interviews: An Interview With Col. Lawrence Wilkerson (Part Two)
50. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: No Escape From Guantánamo: The Latest Habeas Rulings
51. 9/11 anniversary: Remember 9/11, remember Guantánamo (in the Guardian)
52. Bagram: Obama Brings Guantánamo And Rendition To Bagram (And Not The Geneva Conventions)
53. Bagram: Is Bagram Obama’s New Secret Prison?
54. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: First Guantánamo Prisoner To Lose Habeas Hearing Appeals Ruling
55. Closing Guantánamo: Guantánamo Envoy: US Should Have Taken Cleared Prisoners; Some Should Never Have Been Held
56. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Kuwaiti Who Met Bin Laden (but please see 71, below)
57. Mohamed Jawad: The Unsung Heroes Who Helped Secure Mohammed Jawad’s Release From Guantánamo
58. Video: Freed From Guantánamo, Mohammed Jawad Celebrates Eid With His Family
59. Return to torture: Court Allows Return Of Guantánamo Prisoners To Torture
60. Military Commissions: 9/11 Trial At Guantánamo Delayed Again: Can We Have Federal Court Trials Now, Please?
61. Video (in German): Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo On Swiss TV
62. UK anti-terror laws: Another Blow To Britain’s Crumbling Control Order Regime
63. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Three Prisoners Released From Guantánamo: Two To Ireland, One To Yemen
64: Video: Former Guantánamo Prisoner Binyam Mohamed Speaks (Video)
65. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: The Story of Oybek Jabbarov, An Innocent Man Freed From Guantánamo
66: Closing Guantánamo: Obama Drops Plan For New “Indefinite Detention” Policy At Guantánamo
67. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: A Teenage Refugee Freed From Guantánamo And Released In Ireland
68. Torture: Torture in Bagram and Guantánamo: The Declaration of Ahmed al-Darbi
69. Military Commissions: Torture And Futility: Is This The End Of The Military Commissions At Guantánamo?
70. Video: Andy Worthington Discusses Bagram on al-Jazeera
71. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: A Truly Shocking Guantánamo Story: Judge Confirms That An Innocent Man Was Tortured To Make False Confessions (Fouad al-Rabiah)

October 2009

72. Closing Guantánamo: 75 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 31 Could Leave Today
73. Guantánamo and US Congress: On Guantánamo, Lawmakers Reveal They Are Still Dick Cheney’s Pawns
74. Guantánamo and US Congress: Lawyer Blasts “Congressional Depravity” On Guantánamo
75. Barack Obama: Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize: OK, He’s A Nice Guy, But …
76. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Two More Guantánamo Prisoners Released: To Kuwait And Belgium
77. Afghanistan (guest post): A Letter From Afghanistan: Bagram, Afghan suffering and the futility of war
78. Closing Guantánamo: Finding New Homes For 44 Cleared Guantánamo Prisoners
79. Kuwaiti prisoners: Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari
80. Binyam Mohamed: UK Judges Order Release Of Details About The Torture Of Binyam Mohamed By US Agents
81. Uighur prisoners: Justice At Last? Guantánamo Uighurs Ask Supreme Court For Release Into US
82. Guantánamo media: Photos from the launch of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”
83. Torture: Musicians (Finally) Say No To Music Torture
84. Guantánamo media: New Book: The Guantánamo Lawyers – and a talk by Jonathan Hafetz
85. Guantánamo and US Senate: Senate Finally Allows Guantánamo Trials In US, But Not Homes For Innocent Men
86. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Six Uighurs Go To Palau; Seven Remain In Guantánamo

November 2009

87. US enemy combatants: Ali al-Marri’s Statement In Court, October 30, 2009
88. US enemy combatants: Ali al-Marri, The Last US “Enemy Combatant,” Receives Eight-Year Sentence
89. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are The Six Uighurs Released From Guantánamo To Palau?
90. Uighur prisoners: Guantánamo Uighurs In Palau: First Interview And Photo
91. Military Commissions: Military Commissions Revived: Don’t Do It, Mr. President!
92. Rendition: Italian Judge Rules “Extraordinary Rendition” Illegal, Sentences CIA Agents (Abu Omar)
93. US tour: Bringing Guantánamo To New York
94. Video: On Democracy Now! Andy Worthington Discusses the Forthcoming 9/11 Trials and “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”
95. Video: An Evening with Andy Worthington, Discussing Guantánamo (Video)
96. US tour: Guantánamo Comes To The United States: Andy Worthington’s Tour Report
97. Federal court trials, Military Commissions: The Logic of the 9/11 Trials, The Madness of the Military Commissions
98. UK torture: UK Judge Approves Use of Secret Evidence in Guantánamo Case
99. Video: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on VOA News (Video – In Urdu)
100. Federal court trials, Military Commissions: Rep. Jerrold Nadler and David Frakt on Obama’s Three-Tier Justice System For Guantánamo
101. Closing Guantánamo: Obama’s Failure To Close Guantánamo By January Deadline Is Disastrous
102. Guantánamo lawyers: Justice Department Pointlessly Gags Guantánamo Lawyer (Candace Gorman, lawyer for Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi)
103. Video: On ABC News, Andy Worthington Discusses New Film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”
104. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Judge Orders Release Of Algerian From Guantánamo (But He’s Not Going Anywhere)
105. UK torture: Cruel Britannia: Human Rights Watch Exposes British Complicity In Torture In Pakistan
106. Iraq: Iraq Inquiry: Sir Christopher Meyer Confirms That Iraq War Was Illegal
107. Binyam Mohamed: UK Judges Compare Binyam Mohamed’s Torture To That Of Abu Zubaydah

December 2009

108. Closing Guantánamo: Guantánamo: Idealists Leave Obama’s Sinking Ship
109. UK anti-terror laws: The end of secret evidence? (in the Guardian)
110. Video: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo, Plus Clips From “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (Truthout video)
111. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Four Men Leave Guantánamo; Two Face Ill-Defined Trials In Italy
112. UK anti-terror laws: Living With A Terror Suspect: Detainee U’s Landlord Tells His Story
113. Guantánamo lawyers: Guantánamo Lawyer Calls Off Talk In Illinois After Receiving Threats Of Violence
114. Closing Guantánamo: 116 Guantánamo Prisoners Cleared For Release; 171 Still In Limbo
115. Military Commissions: Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Loses Job For Criticizing Military Commissions
116. UK anti-terror laws: Calling Time On The Use Of Secret Evidence In The UK
117. Military Commissions: Chaos and Confusion: The Return of the Military Commissions
118. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Innocent Guantánamo Torture Victim Fouad al-Rabiah Is Released In Kuwait
119. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: What Does It Take To Get Out Of Obama’s Guantánamo?
120. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: “Model Prisoner” at Guantánamo, Tortured in the “Dark Prison,” Loses Habeas Corpus Petition
121. UK torture: UK Court Orders Release Of Torture Evidence In The Case Of Shaker Aamer, The Last British Resident In Guantánamo
122. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Judge Orders Release From Guantánamo Of Unwilling Yemeni Recruit
123. Mohammed El-Gharani: Stranded In Chad: Mohammed El-Gharani, Once Guantánamo’s Youngest Prisoner
124. UK torture: Shaker Aamer: UK Government Drops Opposition To Release Of Torture Evidence
125. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: The Stories Of The Two Somalis Freed From Guantánamo
126. Closing Guantánamo: Serious Problems With Obama’s Plan To Move Guantánamo To Illinois
127. Somali prisoners: “Hell on Earth”: Released Somali Speaks about Guantánamo
128. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are The Four Afghans Released From Guantánamo?
129. Uzbek prisoners: At Christmas, Ex-Guantánamo Prisoner Is Reunited With His Family
130. Interviews: An Interview With Andy Worthington About Guantánamo, “Outside the Law” and New Media
131. Video: Q&A with Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Andy Worthington and Polly Nash at the Launch of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”
132. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Why Obama Must Continue Releasing Yemenis From Guantánamo

(’’)

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). 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 January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

On Saturday February 6, Andy and Polly will be traveling to Oslo for a screening of the film at the Human Rights, Human Wrongs Festival. See here for further details.

The UK tour starts the week after. A dedicated page here, which contains further details, will be updated regularly, but these are the dates confirmed so far:

Tuesday February 16, 6.30 pm: Amnesty International Human Rights Action Centre, 17-25 New Inn Yard, London, EC2 (also see here).

Tuesday February 23: QMUL (Queen Mary, University of London), Mile End Campus, London, E1, venue tbc. The screening follows an afternoon seminar, “Closing Guantánamo: one year on,” organized by QMUL’s Centre for Global Security and Development.

Saturday February 27, 2 pm: NFT2 (National Film Theatre), South Bank, London (also see here). Organized by the BFI (British Film Institute).

Monday March 1, 6 pm: New Theatre, East Building, LSE (London School of Economics), London, WC2. Part of LSE Amnesty International Society’s Human Rights Week 2010.

Friday March 5, 7 pm: Headington Hill Hall, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Oxford. Part of the annual Human Rights Film and Music Festival.

Tuesday March 9, 7.30 pm: Bradford Playhouse, 4-12 Chapel St, Little Germany, Bradford. Facilitated with the support of Bradford Amnesty International Group.

Tuesday March 16, 7 pm: Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London, WC1.

Thursday March 18, 5 pm: University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF. Venue tbc.

Monday March 22: University of Dundee, Nethergate, Dundee. Venue tbc.

Tuesday March 23: University of Aberdeen, King’s College, Aberdeen. Venue tbc.

Tuesday April 27: University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester. Venue tbc. Part of the annual “Spring Festival: Art & Culture For Humanity,” organized by the Human Rights Centre and societies.

About the film

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a new documentary film, directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, telling the story of Guantánamo (and 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, in his first major interview, Omar Deghayes, who was released in December 2007), lawyers for the prisoners (Clive Stafford Smith in the UK and Tom Wilner in the US), 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 Shaker Aamer, 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.

Take action for Shaker Aamer

Throughout the tour, Omar, Andy, Moazzam and Polly (and other speakers) will be focusing on the plight of Shaker Aamer, the only one of the film’s main subjects who is still held in Guantánamo, despite being cleared for release in 2007, and despite the British government asking for him to be returned to the UK in August 2007.

Born in Saudi Arabia, Shaker Aamer moved to the UK in 1994, and was a legal British resident at the time of his capture, after he had traveled to Afghanistan with Moazzam Begg (and their families) to establish a girls’ school and some well-digging projects. He has a British wife and four British children (although he has never seen his youngest child).

As the foremost advocate of the prisoners’ rights in Guantánamo, Shaker’s influence upset the US authorities to such an extent that those pressing for his return fear that the US government wants to return him to Saudi Arabia, the country of his birth, where he will not be at liberty to tell his story, and recent revelations indicate that, despite claims that it has been doing all in its power to secure his release, the British government may also share this view.

In December 2009, it emerged in a court case in the UK that British agents witnessed his abuse while he was held in US custody in Afghanistan, and in January 2010, for Harper’s Magazine, law professor Scott Horton reported that he was tortured in Guantánamo on the same night, in June 2006, that three other men appear to have been killed by representatives of an unknown US agency, and that a cover-up then took place, which successfully passed the deaths off as suicides.

At the screenings, the speakers will discuss what steps we can all take to put pressure on the British government to demand the return of Shaker Aamer to the UK, to be reunited with his family. To get involved now, please visit this Amnesty International action page, to find details of how you can write to David Miliband and Gordon Brown, asking them to demand Shaker’s return. Please also visit this page for a video of Shaker’s daughter Johina handing in a letter to Gordon Brown at 10 Downing Street on January 11, 2010.

Recent feedback

“The film was great — not because I was in it, but because it told the legal and human story of Guantánamo more clearly than anything I have seen.”
Tom Wilner, US attorney who represented the Guantánamo prisoners before the US Supreme Court

“The film was fantastic! It has the unique ability of humanizing those who were detained at Guantánamo like no other I have seen.”
Sari Gelzer, Truthout

“Engaging and moving, and personal. The first [film] to really take you through the lives of the men from their own eyes.”
Debra Sweet, The World Can’t Wait

“I am part of a community of folks from the US who attempted to visit the Guantánamo prison in December 2005, and ended up fasting for a number of days outside the gates. We went then, and we continue our work now, because we heard the cries for justice from within the prison walls. As we gathered tonight as a community, we watched “Outside the Law,” and by the end, we all sat silent, many with tears in our eyes and on our faces. I have so much I’d like to say, but for now I wanted to write a quick note to say how grateful we are that you are out, and that you are speaking out with such profound humanity. I am only sorry what we can do is so little, and that so many remain in the prison.”
Matt Daloisio, Witness Against Torture

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. For inquiries about screenings, please also feel free to contact Maryam Hassan.

“Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” is a Spectacle Production (74 minutes, 2009), and copies of the DVD are now available. As featured on Democracy Now!, ABC News and Truthout. See here for videos of the Q&A session (with Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Andy Worthington and Polly Nash) that followed the launch of the film in London on October 21, 2009.

(’’)

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). 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 January 2010, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The two men in question — Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul — were tried and convicted in 2008, but whereas Hamdan, a driver for Osama bin Laden, had the major charge against him (conspiracy) dismissed by a military jury in August 2008, and was sentenced to serve just six months for providing material support to terrorism, al-Bahlul, who made a video promoting al-Qaeda and is regularly described as al-Qaeda’s “media secretary,” was convicted of conspiracy, solicitation of murder, and providing material support to terrorism, and received a life sentence in November 2008.

Under consideration are two specific questions: firstly, whether providing material support to terrorism is a valid basis for conviction in a war crimes court; and, secondly, whether al-Bahlul’s trial was unfair because he was denied the right to represent himself.

On the first point, lawyers have always maintained that providing material support to terrorism is not a valid war crime. In an email exchange last week, Lt. Col. David Frakt, who represented al-Bahlul before his trial, explained, “It has always been my position that material support to terrorism was a fabricated war crime that was not traditionally triable in a military commission as of the time of Mr. al-Bahlul and Mr. Hamdan’s affiliation with al-Qaeda, but rather was illegally retroactively applied to them several years after the fact.”

As Lt. Col. Frakt also mentioned, the problems with the material support charges had been advanced by Hamdan’s attorneys in a pre-trial motion to dismiss the charge back in February 2008, when they also attempted to dismiss the conspiracy charge for the same reason. On July 16, the judge in Hamdan’s case, Army Capt. Keith Allred, rejected the motion to dismiss on ex post facto grounds, finding that “conspiracy and material support for terrorism have traditionally been considered violations of the law of war,” as Human Rights First explained in a summary of Hamdan’s case.

However, as Lt. Col. Frakt described it, Allred indicated that it was “a very close issue. Although he acknowledged that the crime of material support to terrorism had never been the subject of charges in a military commission before, he reasoned that similar conduct, essentially being part of an armed insurgent group committing war crimes against civilians, had been treated as a war crime in the past, such as during the US Civil War. He argued that Congress was merely providing a new name to conduct that had always been treated as a law of war offense triable by military commission.”

Significantly, Lt. Col. Frakt added, “What Captain Allred ignored is that what Mr. Hamdan was charged with was essentially serving as a personal driver and servant to Osama bin Laden and there was no indication of involvement in any war crimes, against civilians or otherwise.”

Even more significantly, when the Obama administration and Congress revived the Commissions last summer, David Kris, a senior Justice Department official in the National Security Division, testified that the Justice Department had concluded that material support to terrorism was not a traditional war crime and should be removed from the new version of the Military Commissions Act. As Kris explained (PDF):

While this is a very important offense in our counterterrorism prosecutions in Federal Court … there are serious questions as to whether material support for terrorism or terrorist groups is a traditional violation of the rules of war … our experts believe that there is a significant risk that appellate courts will ultimately conclude that material support for terrorism is not a traditional law of war offense, thereby reversing hard-won convictions and leading to questions about the system’s legitimacy.

As Lt. Col. Frakt explained to me, despite Kris’ concerns, “Congress rejected this sound advice and included material support to terrorism in the revised 2009 MCA, possibly in part because I advised Congress when I testified that if they removed this crime from statute there would be very few detainees left to prosecute.”

Noticeably, Kris was more enthusiastic about retaining the conspiracy charge, but as I explained in an article in November, “this, too, is fraught with problems. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case in which the Supreme Court shut down the Commissions’ first incarnation, Justice John Paul Stevens, in an opinion in which he was joined by three other justices, made a point of mentioning that ‘conspiracy’ has not traditionally been considered a war crime.”

In Hamdan’s case, a successful appeal on the material support charge would have little practical effect, as he is already a free man (although Charles Schmitz, who served as his interpreter during proceedings at Guantánamo, told the Wall Street Journal that it was “important to him to clear the conviction,” because “In Yemen, they look at him as a criminal. He’s been tainted”).

To be honest, a successful appeal on the material support charge would mean little to al-Bahlul either, although, it would, of course, fulfill the Justice Department’s own fears about including it in the new legislation, especially as the Obama administration has already announced its intention of using it against several prisoners currently held at Guantánamo.

It remains to be seen, of course, whether material support and/or conspiracy survive an appeal, but in court last week, lawyers for al-Bahlul pushed both points. As the Wall Street Journal described it, Michel Paradis, representing al-Bahlul, argued that the charges on which al-Bahlul was convicted “weren’t traditionally considered war crimes under international law, and thus Congress in 2006 couldn’t retroactively make them so. International law strongly discourages viewing conspiracy as a war crime. Providing material support for terrorism, while a domestic US crime since the 1990s, has never been considered a war crime.”

Ingeniously, the lawyers also argued that al-Bahlul’s production of propaganda material for al-Qaeda should have been protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, guaranteeing freedom of speech. One of his attorneys, Mike Berrigan, told reporters, “Mr. al-Bahlul’s conduct in making this documentary — his prosecution for that conduct — was a violation of the US First Amendment.  Not that Mr. al-Bahlul had particular First Amendment rights, but the constitutional restrictions on the US government prosecuting someone for speech made the prosecution itself illegal. Mr. al-Bahlul’s conduct in making that documentary does not come close to the standard of inciting violence that can be criminalized.”

The prosecution disagreed, of course, and Navy Capt. Edward White, who argued for the government at the appeal, stated, “Our position was that, as an enemy combatant waging war against the United States from abroad, he does not have First Amendment rights. He crossed the line into criminally, soliciting other people — inducing, enticing, encouraging, persuading them — to commit war crimes.”

Beyond all these claims, however, the most disturbing aspect of al-Bahlul’s conviction is the nature of his trial, and what Lt. Col. Frakt described to me as his “best hope” is that the Court of Military Commission Review will recognize that the one-sided trial, in which he refused to mount a defense, was fundamentally unfair — or, as Lt. Col. Frakt put it, the judge’s “denial of his right to self-representation essentially denied him of a fair trial because the judge knew that he would not allow me to represent him.”

This was indeed what happened. Al-Bahlul sought strenuously to represent himself, but although his request was granted by Army Col. Peter Brownback, his first judge in the revived Commissions, Brownback was then involuntarily retired from the Army, and the new judge, Air Force Col. Ronald Gregory, revoked al- Bahlul’s pro se status (his right to represent himself).

As I explained at the time, after Maj. Frakt (as he was at the time) announced that al-Bahlul was boycotting the trial, because he wished to represent himself, and did not wish to be represented by a military lawyer, Frakt then asked to be relieved, noting that he was obliged to respect his client’s wishes. When Col. Gregory refused, he declared that he too was unable to participate. “I will be joining Mr. al-Bahlul’s boycott of the proceedings,” he said, “standing mute at the table.” He then refused to answer any further questions from Col. Gregory, even though the judge attempted to argue that he was “obliged to participate,” before conceding that it was not in his power to force him to do so. As Lt. Col. Frakt described it to me last week, Col. Gregory’s actions “ensured there would be no defense at all in the final military commission trial of the Bush era.”

Lt. Col. Frakt also explained that, although appeals are automatic in the Commissions unless waived in writing, the only reason that al-Bahlul failed to waive his right to appeal in writing was because he “refused to accept any papers from his lawyers or the court.” As Frakt described it, “Mr. al-Bahlul made it plain to me that he did not wish to appeal any conviction and he categorically refused to meet with his appointed appellate counsel to discuss any possible grounds for appeal.”

Lt. Col. Frakt was full of praise for the lawyers attempting to defend al-Bahlul, even though they “were hampered by the fact that I did not preserve any issues for appeal (other than the self-representation issue) because I did not speak during the entire trial.” He noted that they “managed to find a way to raise a number of interesting and important issues that strike at the core of the legitimacy of the military commissions,” but in the end, what is most noticeable about al-Bahlul’s case is how he remains in a position of extraordinary isolation at Guantánamo.

Not only is he imprisoned, alone, to serve out his life sentence, but as Lt. Col. Frakt explained, “it remains a mystery what will happen to Mr. al-Bahlul. Although he is serving a life sentence, under current US law, he can’t be transferred out of Guantánamo to a prison on the mainland because detainees can only be transferred to the US to face trial.”

Unless he is to stay in Guantánamo, as the prison slowly empties around him, until, perhaps, he is the only prisoner left, it seems, as Lt. Col. Frakt also explained, that “special legislation will be required” to enable him to leave Guantánamo, even if it is just to resume his life sentence elsewhere.

Lost in the system, essentially, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul is another example of the way in which justice at Guantánamo never progressed much beyond an ad hoc system full of holes, and, whatever the outcome of these appeals, it should give the Obama administration some salutary reminders as to why the Commissions remain an unsuitable system for any kind of credible trial.

(’’)

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). 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 January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation. Cross-posted on The Public Record.

See the following for a sequence of articles dealing with the stumbling progress of the Military Commissions: The reviled Military Commissions collapse (June 2007), A bad week at Guantánamo (Commissions revived, September 2007), The curse of the Military Commissions strikes the prosecutors (September 2007), A good week at Guantánamo (chief prosecutor resigns, October 2007), The story of Mohamed Jawad (October 2007), The story of Omar Khadr (November 2007), Guantánamo trials: where are the terrorists? (February 2008), Six in Guantánamo charged with 9/11 attacks: why now, and what about the torture? (February 2008), Guantánamo’s shambolic trials (ex-prosecutor turns, February 2008), Torture allegations dog Guantánamo trials (March 2008), African embassy bombing suspect charged (March 2008), The US military’s shameless propaganda over 9/11 trials (April 2008), Betrayals, backsliding and boycotts (May 2008), Fact Sheet: The 16 prisoners charged (May 2008), Afghan fantasist to face trial (June 2008), 9/11 trial defendants cry torture (June 2008), USS Cole bombing suspect charged (July 2008), Folly and injustice (Salim Hamdan’s trial approved, July 2008), A critical overview of Salim Hamdan’s Guantánamo trial and the dubious verdict (August 2008), Salim Hamdan’s sentence signals the end of Guantánamo (August 2008), Controversy still plagues Guantánamo’s Military Commissions (September 2008), Another Insignificant Afghan Charged (September 2008), Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo (September 2008), Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Running the 9/11 Trials? (September 2008), two articles exploring the Commissions’ corrupt command structure (The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials, and New Evidence of Systemic Bias in Guantánamo Trials, October 2008), The collapse of Omar Khadr’s Guantánamo trial (October 2008), Corruption at Guantánamo (legal adviser faces military investigations, October 2008), An empty trial at Guantánamo (Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, October 2008), Life sentence for al-Qaeda propagandist fails to justify Guantánamo trials (al-Bahlul, November 2008), 20 Reasons To Shut Down The Guantánamo Trials (profiles of all the prisoners charged, November 2008), How Guantánamo Can Be Closed: Advice for Barack Obama (November 2008), More Dubious Charges in the Guantánamo Trials (two Kuwaitis, November 2008), The End of Guantánamo (Salim Hamdan repatriated, November 2008), Torture, Preventive Detention and the Terror Trials at Guantánamo (December 2008), Is the 9/11 trial confession an al-Qaeda coup? (December 2008), The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns Chaotic Trials (Lt. Col. Vandeveld on Mohamed Jawad, January 2009), Torture taints the case of Mohamed Jawad (January 2009), Bush Era Ends with Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani, January 2009), Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right to Halt The Guantánamo Trials (January 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009).

And for a sequence of articles dealing with the Obama administration’s response to the Military Commissions, see: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), Who’s Running Guantánamo? (February 2009), The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (February 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough (May 2009), Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo (May 2009), New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo (May 2009), Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (May 2009), My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention” (May 2009), Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians (May 2009), A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad (June 2009), A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (June 2009), Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators (June 2009), Predictable Chaos As Guantánamo Trials Resume (July 2009), David Frakt: Military Commissions “A Catastrophic Failure” (August 2009), 9/11 Trial At Guantánamo Delayed Again: Can We Have Federal Court Trials Now, Please? (September 2009), Torture And Futility: Is This The End Of The Military Commissions At Guantánamo? (September 2009), Resisting Injustice In Guantánamo: The Story Of Fayiz Al-Kandari (October 2009), Military Commissions Revived: Don’t Do It, Mr. President! (November 2009), The Logic of the 9/11 Trials, The Madness of the Military Commissions (November 2009), Rep. Jerrold Nadler and David Frakt on Obama’s Three-Tier Justice System For Guantánamo (November 2009), Guantánamo: Idealists Leave Obama’s Sinking Ship (November 2009), Chaos and Confusion: The Return of the Military Commissions (December 2009), Afghan Nobody Faces Trial by Military Commission (January 2010).

Please support my work!

For four years, I have been providing detailed information about the prisoners in Guantánamo, first through my book The Guantánamo Files, which tells the story of the prison and around 450 of the prisoners held, and then through 12 online chapters, which provide information about the majority of the other 329 prisoners. Alongside this project, I have been working assiduously as a full-time independent journalist, covering stories as they develop, and focusing in particular on the stories of released prisoners, the Military Commission trial system, and the prisoners’ progress in the courts, through their habeas corpus petitions.

My intention, all along, has been to bring the men to life through their stories, dispelling the Bush administration’s rhetoric about the prison holding “the worst of the worst,” and demonstrating how, instead, the majority of the prisoners were either innocent men, seized by the US military’s allies at a time when bounty payments were widespread, or recruits for the Taliban, who had been encouraged by supporters in their homelands to help the Taliban in a long-running inter-Muslim civil war (with the Northern Alliance), which began long before the 9/11 attacks and, for the most part, had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism. As I explained in the introduction to my four-part Definitive Prisoner List (updated on January 1), I remain convinced, through detailed research and through comments from insiders with knowledge of Guantánamo, that “at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total” had no involvement with terrorism.

However, as this is a blog, rather than a website, I recognize that it’s increasingly difficult to navigate, as there are so many “Categories,” and, most crucially, there is no access to articles in anything other than reverse chronological order. In an attempt to remedy this shortcoming, and to provide easy access to the most important articles on the site, I’ve put together five chronological lists, covering the periods May to December 2007, January to June 2008, July to December 2008, January to June 2009 and July to December 2009, in the hope that they will provide a useful tool for navigation.

In this fourth period covered by the list, I continued writing for the Guardian, the Future of Freedom Foundation, Cageprisoners, the Huffington Post, CounterPunch, Antiwar.com, AlterNet and ZNet, and also maintained contact with the Daily Star, Lebanon. I also wrote guest columns for the ACLU, co-wrote a post with my friend The Talking Dog, and made my first appearance on Democracy Now!

After George W. Bush shuffled off the world stage on January 20, Barack Obama launched his presidency exactly as his supporters had hoped, freezing the Military Commissions, and issuing executive orders upholding the absolute prohibition on torture and ordering the closure of Guantánamo by January 22, 2010. Despite this excellent start, the program soon slipped. The Justice Department continued to obstruct the defense teams in the prisoners’ habeas petitions, and the government persisted in putting forward cases that ended in humiliation, as judges cast an objective — and authoritative — eye over the supposed evidence. Of the eight cases decided in this period, four went the government’s way, but four others were won by the prisoners, including the former juvenile prisoner Mohammed El-Gharani, and Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, a Syrian who had been tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy.

One sign of paralysis in the government, after its bold early start, concerned the release of prisoners. Just 12 prisoners were released by Obama in this period (to add to the six released in Bush’s dying days). They included Binyam Mohamed and four of the 17 Uighurs, who were sent to Bermuda after the administration failed to seize the initiative by rehousing them in the United States. In April, Obama further cheered those seeking accountability for the Bush administration’s crimes by releasing four notorious “torture memos,” issued in 2002 and 2005 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, but by May his reforming zeal effectively ground to a halt, when, in a major national security speech, he announced his intention to revive the Military Commissions, and to hold some prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial.

While closely monitoring President Obama’s retreat from the bold initiatives of his first few days, I also attracted significant attention with my Definitive Prisoner List (published in March, and updated in January 2010), and with my articles about the CIA “ghost prisoner” Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was tortured in Egypt to produce a false confession about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In May, I was the first Western journalist to pick up on al-Libi’s suspicious death in a Libyan prison, and in June I wrote an exclusive report about his “extraordinary rendition” and torture, based on information provided by the former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes through a contact in Libya. I also wrote well-received articles about the timing of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, and the fact that prisoners in Afghanistan were being tortured as early as December 2001, eight months before the “torture memos” were issued, and wrote a report for Cageprisoners analyzing the weight records of the Guantánamo prisoners, and revealing that, throughout the prison’s history, one in ten of the total population — 80 prisoners in total — weighed, at some point, less than 112 pounds (eight stone, or 50 kg), and 20 of these prisoners weighed less than 98 pounds (seven stone, or 44 kg).

Throughout this period, I also devoted time to the parlous state of Britain’s anti-terror laws, running a series on secret evidence in April, and covering an important ruling in June, when the Law Lords savaged the government’s control order regime, which functioned as a form of house arrest for men held without charge or trial on the basis of secret evidence. I also covered a story first published in the Mail on Sunday, but almost completely ignored, indicating further complicity by the British government in the rendition and torture of Binyam Mohamed, and involving an informer who was sent to visit Mohamed during his 18 months of torture in Morocco.

An archive of Guantánamo articles: Part Four, January to June 2009

January 2009

1. Closing Guantánamo: Will Europe help close Guantánamo? (in the Guardian)
2. Uighur prisoners: A New Year Message to Barack Obama: Free the Guantánamo Uighurs
3. Guantánamo and habeas corpus, Military Commissions: The Top Ten Judges of 2008 (with The Talking Dog)
4. Military Commissions: The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials
5. Guantánamo anniversary: Seven Years Of Guantánamo, And A Call For Justice At Bagram
6. Guantánamo anniversary: Will Guantánamo Bay ever close? (in the Guardian)
7. Guantánamo anniversary: Seven Years of Guantánamo, Seven Years of Torture and Lies
8. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: No End in Sight for the “Enemy Combatants” of Guantánamo (two prisoners lose their habeas petitions)
9. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Former Guantánamo Prosecutor Condemns “Chaotic” Trials in Case of Teenage Torture Victim (Mohamed Jawad)
10. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo’s Forgotten Child (Mohammed El-Gharani)
11. Military Commissions: Torture Taints the Case of Guantánamo Prisoner Mohamed Jawad
12. Binyam Mohamed: British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo
13. Torture: Bush Era Ends With Guantánamo Trial Chief’s Torture Confession (Susan Crawford on Mohammed al-Qahtani)
14. Children in Guantánamo: The Tale of Two Tortured Teenagers (in Bagram and Guantánamo) (for the ACLU)
15. Military Commissions: Chaos and Lies: Why Obama Was Right To Halt The Guantánamo Trials
16. Closing Guantánamo: Return To The Law: Obama Orders Guantánamo Closure, Torture Ban and Review of US “Enemy Combatant” Case
17. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Refuting Cheney’s Lies: The Stories of Six Prisoners Released from Guantánamo (an Afghan, an Algerian and four Iraqis)
18. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: How Cooking For The Taliban Gets You Life In Guantánamo (Ghaleb al-Bihani loses habeas petition)

February 2009

19. Closing Guantánamo: Don’t Forget Guantánamo (hunger strikes and doubts about the Pentagon’s role)
20. Binyam Mohamed: A transcript of Jon Snow’s interview with David Miliband on Channel 4 News
21. Binyam Mohamed: The betrayal of British torture victim Binyam Mohamed
22. Closing Guantánamo: Who’s Running Guantánamo? (more on hunger strikes and doubts about the Pentagon’s role)
23. Closing Guantánamo: Guantánamo’s refugees (prisoners cleared for release who cannot be repatriated)
24. Binyam Mohamed: Hiding Torture And Freeing Binyam Mohamed From Guantánamo
25. Interviews: The Guantánamo Files: Andy Worthington interviewed for Foreign Policy Journal
26. Closing Guantánamo: Guantánamo: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (an analysis of the supposed “evidence” against the prisoners)
27. Uighur prisoners: Bad News And Good News For The Guantánamo Uighurs (Obama backs appeal against rehousing Uighurs in the US)
28. Interviews: The Talking Dog interviews Darrel Vandeveld, former Guantánamo prosecutor (for Mohamed Jawad)
29. Binyam Mohamed: Binyam Mohamed’s Coming Home From Guantánamo, As Torture Allegations Mount
30. UK anti-terror laws: Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture
31. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Binyam Mohamed’s statement on his release from Guantánamo
32. Conditions in Guantánamo: Obama’s “Humane” Guantánamo Is A Bitter Joke
33. Binyam Mohamed: Who Is Binyam Mohamed, the British resident released from Guantánamo?
34. UK anti-terror laws: Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh

March 2009

35. US enemy combatants: Ending The Cruel Isolation Of Ali al-Marri, The Last US “Enemy Combatant”
36. Interviews: An interview with Andy Worthington, author of “The Guantánamo Files” (by Elizabeth Ferrari)
37. Binyam Mohamed: Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story
38. US enemy combatants: Why The US Under Obama Is Still A Dictatorship (Ali al-Marri)
39. British residents: Forgotten in Guantánamo: British resident Shaker Aamer
40. Recidivism: Who are ‘the worst of the worst’? (in the Guardian)
41. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Guantánamo: The Nobodies Formerly Known As Enemy Combatants
42. UK anti-terror laws: Britain’s insane secret terror evidence
43. Intelligence failures: Lawrence Wilkerson Tells The Truth About Guantánamo
44. Conditions in Guantánamo: Guantánamo’s Long-Term Hunger Striker Should Be Sent Home
45. Torture: Prosecuting the Bush Administration’s Torturers
46. Binyam Mohamed: Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom
47. Uighur prisoners: A Letter To Barack Obama From A Guantánamo Uighur
48. Binyam Mohamed: Guantánamo, Bagram and the “Dark Prison”: Binyam Mohamed talks to Moazzam Begg
49. Torture: Abu Zubaydah: The Futility Of Torture and A Trail of Broken Lives
50. UK anti-terror laws: Torture taints all our lives (in the Guardian)

April 2009

51. UK anti-terror laws: Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence
52. UK anti-terror laws: Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y
53. UK anti-terror laws: Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB
54. UK anti-terror laws: Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U
55. UK anti-terror laws: Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara
56. UK anti-terror laws: Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z
57. UK anti-terror laws: Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?
58. Bagram: Justice extends to Bagram, Guantánamo’s Dark Mirror
59. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Farce at Guantánamo, as cleared prisoner’s habeas petition is denied (Hedi Hammamy, a Tunisian)
60. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: The Story of Ayman Batarfi, a Doctor in Guantánamo
61. Torture: Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part One)
62. Torture: 9/11 Commission Director Philip Zelikow Condemns Bush Torture Program
63. Torture: Ten Terrible Truths About The CIA Torture Memos (Part Two)
64. Torture: Who Authorized The Torture of Abu Zubaydah?
65. Torture: CIA Torture Began In Afghanistan 8 Months Before DoJ Approval
66. Abu Ghraib: Images that exposed the truth on abuse (in the Guardian)
67. UK anti-terror laws: Taking liberties with our justice system (in the Guardian)
68. Torture: Even In Cheney’s Bleak World, The Al-Qaeda-Iraq Torture Story Is A New Low

May 2009

69. US enemy combatants: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged As US “Enemy Combatant” Pleads Guilty (Ali al-Marri)
70. Closing Guantánamo: Obama’s First 100 Days: A Start On Guantánamo, But Not Enough
71. Military Commissions, preventive detention: Obama Returns To Bush Era On Guantánamo
72. Military Commissions: New Chief Prosecutor Appointed For Military Commissions At Guantánamo
73. Torture: Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture
74. Torture: Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi Has Died In A Libyan Prison
75. Torture: Dick Cheney And The Death Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi
76. Torture: The “Suicide” Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi: Why The Media Silence?
77. Torture: Two Experts Cast Doubt On Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi’s “Suicide”
78. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Judge Condemns “Mosaic” Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses (Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed)
79. Torture: Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney On Use Of Torture To Invade Iraq
80. Torture: Death in Libya, betrayal in the west (in the Guardian)
81. Torture: Cheney’s Lies Undermined By Iraq Interrogator Matthew Alexander
82. Abu Ghraib: The Torture Photos We’re Not Supposed To See
83. Binyam Mohamed: UK Government Lies Exposed; Spy Visited Binyam Mohamed In Morocco
84. Binyam Mohamed: Daily Mail Pulls Story About Binyam Mohamed And British Spy
85. Prisoners released from Guantánamo, conditions in Guantánamo: Pain At Guantánamo And Paralysis In Government (Lakhdar Boumediene)
86. Torture: Lawrence Wilkerson Nails Cheney’s Iraq Lies Again (And Rumsfeld And The CIA)
87. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies (Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed and other prisoners)
88. Binyam Mohamed: Government Bans Testimony On Binyam Mohamed And The British Spy
89. Uighur prisoners: Guantánamo: A Real Uyghur Slams Newt Gingrich’s Racist Stupidity
90. Federal court trials: Out Of Guantánamo: African Embassy Bombing Suspect To Be Tried In US Court (Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani)
91. Military Commissions, preventive detention: Transcript Of President Obama’s Speech About Guantánamo And Terrorism, May 21, 2009
92. Military Commissions, preventive detention: My Message To Obama: Great Speech, But No Military Commissions and No “Preventive Detention”
93. Binyam Mohamed: More twists in the tale of Binyam Mohamed (in the Guardian)
94. Binyam Mohamed: Did Hillary Clinton Threaten UK Over Binyam Mohamed Torture Disclosure?
95. Closing Guantánamo: Guantánamo And The Many Failures Of US Politicians
96. UK torture: Outsourcing torture to foreign climes (UK-assisted torture in Bangladesh, in the Guardian)
97. Algerian prisoners: Life After Guantánamo: Lakhdar Boumediene Speaks
98. Deaths in Guantánamo: Forgotten: The Second Anniversary Of A Guantánamo Suicide (Abdul Rahman al-Amri)
99. Uighur prisoners: Free The Guantánamo Uighurs!

June 2009

100. Military Commissions: A Child At Guantánamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad
101. Deaths in Guantánamo: Yemeni Prisoner Muhammad Salih Dies At Guantánamo
102. Diego Garcia: Revealed: Identity Of Guantánamo Torture Victim Rendered Through Diego Garcia (Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni)
103. Military Commissions: A Broken Circus: Guantánamo Trials Convene For One Day Of Chaos (Omar Khadr)
104. Deaths in Guantánamo: Death At Guantánamo Hovers Over Obama’s Middle East Visit
105. Recidivism: New York Times finally apologizes for false Guantánamo recidivism story
106. Uighur prisoners: Uighur Protest In Guantánamo: Photos
107. Military Commissions: Obama Proposes Swift Execution of Alleged 9/11 Conspirators
108. Closing Guantánamo: Council Of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner Urges European Governments To Help Close Guantánamo
109. Video: Lakhdar Boumediene Talks About Torture At Guantánamo
110. Uighur prisoners: From Guantánamo To The South Pacific: Is This A Joke?
111. Conditions at Guantánamo: Guantánamo’s Hidden History: Shocking Statistics of Starvation (report for Cageprisoners)
112. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Guantánamo’s Youngest Prisoner Released To Chad (Mohammed El-Gharani)
113. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Who Are The Four Guantánamo Uighurs Sent To Bermuda?
114. Deaths in Guantánamo: Binyam Mohamed: Was Muhammad Salih’s Death In Guantánamo Suicide?
115. UK anti-terror laws: Law Lords Condemn UK’s Use of Secret Evidence And Control Orders
116. Uighur prisoners: Guantánamo’s Uighurs In Bermuda: Interviews And New Photos
117. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: The Last Iraqi In Guantánamo, Cleared Six Years Ago, Returns Home
118. Military Commissions, preventive detention: Obama’s Confusion Over Guantánamo Terror Trials
119. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: Empty Evidence: The Stories Of The Saudis Released From Guantánamo
120. Closing Guantánamo: Europe agrees to accept cleared Guantánamo prisoners (and I talk to the BBC)
121. UK torture: Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee
122. UK torture: Britain’s Torture Troubles: What Tony Blair Knew
123. Mohammed El-Gharani: Guantánamo’s Youngest Prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, Is Imprisoned In Chad
124. Torture: WORLD EXCLUSIVE: New Revelations About The Torture Of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi
125. Prisoners released from Guantánamo: The Lies Told About The Saudi Hunger Striker Released From Guantánamo
126. Video: Andy Worthington Discusses Guantánamo on Democracy Now!
127. Guantánamo and habeas corpus: Why Did It Take So Long To Order The Release From Guantánamo Of An Al-Qaeda Torture Victim? (Abdul Rahim al-Ginco wins habeas petition)
128. Torture: Never Forget: The International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
129. Torture: ACLU Interviews Wife Of Rendition Victim Abou Elkassim Britel
130. Torture: Torture In Guantánamo: The Force-feeding Of Hunger Strikers (for the ACLU)
131. Video: Mohammed El-Gharani, Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, speaks to al-Jazeera
132. Libya: UK protestors mark 13th anniversary of Libyan prison massacre
133. Preventive detention: Guantánamo: Charge Or Release Prisoners, Say No To Indefinite Detention

(’’)

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). 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 January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

While waiting for Scott (whose phone had inexplicably cut out as the interview was supposed to begin), I explained the outline of the story, which focuses on the testimony of Army Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman and three other members of the US military, who have presented a coherent explanation for how the men were, in fact, taken to a secret facility outside the main perimeter fence of Guantánamo on the evening of June 9, 2006, where they died — either accidentally, as a result of torture that went too far, or because they were murdered. According to this account, the corpses were then returned to Camp Delta, where the triple suicide story was subsequently concocted.

Once Scott joined in, he provided further details, and we also discussed how disappointing it is that the story has been almost completely ignored in the mainstream media in America. I also talked about the testimony of the British resident Shaker Aamer, who told his attorneys that he was brutally tortured on the same evening. This seems to add another explanation for why he has not been freed, despite being cleared for release in 2007, because he knows too much about what has happened in Guantánamo.

I also had the opportunity to discuss the implications that Scott’s story has for two further deaths at Guantánamo, which were also described as suicides: the death of Abdul Rahman al-Amri in May 2007, and, last June (on President Obama’s watch), the death of Muhammad Salih. At the time, doubts were expressed about Salih’s death, because he had been a spirited opponent of the regime at Guantánamo, who had been inexplicably moved from the general population several months before his death.

For those who want to know more, please read Scott’s article, my recap on Scott’s article, my archive on the deaths at Guantánamo, and the Seton Hall Law School’s detailed analysis of the holes in the official investigation of the deaths in June 2006 (PDF).

There are many other important aspects of the story that need to be examined to grasp the whole picture — not least that all five men were long-term hunger strikers (who may, therefore, have made powerful enemies somewhere within the prison’s command structure), that two of the men who died in June 2006 had been cleared for release before their deaths, and that at least one of these men had been informed of his release, and was happy about it.

Last night, I reread the Seton Hall report, after discovering a few dissenting voices arguing that the suicide narrative is sound. Nothing that I read confirmed that this was the case. In fact, the Seton Hall report reveals very clearly how written statements were not taken from witnesses at the time (as they should have been), but were, instead, requested and then suddenly, and inexplicably abandoned, that no attempt was made to find out exactly who was on duty on the evening, and to take statements from them, and that there are huge discrepancies between the various accounts that were provided in the days and weeks following the deaths.

If you find any of this disturbing, please help to keep this story alive. The mainstream media has turned its back on it — as the Justice Department did, in an unconvincing manner — but that’s no reason for us not to keep this story alive on the web.

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). 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 January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and launched in October 2009), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.