Last month, when I visited the US to campaign for the closure of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, I was so busy flying from city to city and from event to event that I did not have time to take in — and in some cases to cross-post — articles of interest that were published at the time.

In the hope of keeping alive some of that spirit of awareness about the ongoing injustice of Guantánamo that flickered briefly to life around the anniversary, I’m planning to cross-post some of these articles, and I’m beginning with an article written for the National Law Journal by the military defense attorney Todd Pierce, someone I regard as both a friend and a colleague. I have met up with Todd on my visits to Washington D.C. in November 2009, in January 2011 and last month, and we have also communicated by email, regarding his involvement in the military commissions at Guantánamo, first under George W. Bush, and now under Barack Obama.

Specifically, Todd was involved in the case of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who received a life sentence in November 2008 for producing a video for al-Qaeda, after a one-sided trial in which he refused to mount a defense, and he was one of the lawyers involved in appealing the ruling, arguing that it was an assault on the First Amendment, which, if left unchecked, could lead to all manner of foreigners — including, for example, investigative journalists like me — also being targeted. Read the rest of this entry »

“‘Outside the Law’ is a powerful film that has helped ensure that Guantánamo and the men unlawfully held there have not been forgotten.”
Kate Allen, Director, Amnesty International UK

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

As featured on Democracy Now!, ABC News and Truthout. Buy the DVD here (£10 + £2 postage in the UK, and worldwide) or here if in the US ($10 post free).

With the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay now in its 11th year of existence, and with no sign of when, if ever the prison will be closed, the need to campaign for its closure is greater than ever, even though the will to do so is largely drowned out by the voices of US lawmakers and pundits who would like it to stay open, and by a colossal indifference on the part of far too many citizens of the US, and others around the world.

This is deeply disturbing, as a prison in which people are subjected to arbitrary detention (as Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, explained three weeks ago) cannot simply be brushed aside or forgotten about by those who claim to care about legal and humane detention practices. As long ago as October 2003, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross complained about the damaging effects of open-ended arbitrary detention on the mental health of the prisoners held at Guantánamo, and that remains true eight years and four months later, even if most of the prisoners are now allowed time to socialize. Back in 2003, Girod said, “The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem.” Read the rest of this entry »

In the whole sordid ten-year history of Guantánamo, one of the most distressing events, which has never been adequately investigated, involves the deaths of three prisoners on the night of June 9, 2006. According to the authorities, the deaths were the result of a coordinated suicide pact, but this never sounded credible to anyone who investigated the official story, and found that they were obliged to believe that the men had somehow tied themselves up, stuffed rags down their throats and managed to hang themselves, in a prison where the guards checked on them every few minutes.

These doubts were thoroughly exposed in a report (“Death in Camp Delta“) published by the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey in December 2009,  which involved a detailed examination of thousands of pages of records and reports from an inadequate investigation conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (which concluded in 2008, and which I discussed here), and it was followed, in January 2010, by an explosive article in Harper’s Magazine by Scott Horton (“The Guantánamo ‘Suicides’: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle“), drawing on the testimony of US military personnel who were in Guantanamo at the time of the deaths, and who cast further doubts on the official story, mentioning a secret camp known as “Camp No,” and the movement of vehicles — very possibly to and from this facility — on the night that the men died. See here and here for my commentary.

In an attempt to keep the deaths of these three men in the public eye, the Norwegian filmmaker Erling Borgen spent three years making a documentary film, “Death in Camp Delta,” which I recently reviewed for Russell Michaels’ show “Cinepolitics” on Press TV, along with the film reviewer Neil Smith. The video of the show is below, via Daily Motion, and for further information about the film, please see the “Death in Camp Delta” website and the Facebook page. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, when I was in the US to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison, I paid a visit, during my 30-hour visit to San Francisco and the Bay Area, to KPFA in Berkeley for an interview on “The Morning Mix with Project Censored,” which also featured the wonderful singer/songwriter David Rovics, Pardiss Kebriaei of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Almerindo Ojeda of UC Davis, who runs the university’s Guantánamo Testimonials Project.

That half-hour show is here, and it was regarded by the producers as covering so much important material in such a short amount of time that a decision was made to run an extended version, as part of a fundraising drive, on February 17, and the resultant two and a half hour show is available here, and is embedded below. Read the rest of this entry »

Please sign the e-petition (British citizens and residents only).

On Tuesday, on the 10th anniversary of the arrival at Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last the British resident in the prison, his family and his lawyers in London launched an e-petition on the government’s website, entitled, “Return Shaker Aamer to the UK,” in which they noted:

Shaker Aamer is a British resident with a British wife and children who has been imprisoned without trial by the US in Bagram Airforce Base and Guantánamo Bay for over ten years. The Foreign Secretary and the Foreign Office must undertake urgent new initiatives to achieve the immediate transfer of Shaker Aamer to the UK from continuing indefinite detention in Guantánamo Bay.

With your help, we can secure the 100,000 signatures needed by May 14 for Shaker’s case to be debated in Parliament, and for the government to explain why he is still held, even though his release has been repeatedly approved by the US government, and repeatedly sought by the UK government: Read the rest of this entry »

Originally posted on the “Close Guantánamo” website, and written by Andy Worthington.

Ten years ago, on February 14, 2002, Shaker Aamer, a British resident, and originally one of 16 British prisoners in Guantánamo, arrived in Camp X-Ray, the rudimentary prison in the grounds of the US naval base in Cuba’s easternmost bay, which was used to hold prisoners until the first blocks of a more permanent facility, Camp Delta, opened for business in May 2002. On the same day, his fourth child, a son, was born.

A hugely charismatic figure, Aamer, born in Saudi Arabia in 1968, had moved to London in 1996, and had worked as an Arabic translator for a firm of solicitors working on immigration cases. He met and married a British woman and was granted residency. In June 2001, he took his family to Kabul — as did his friend Moazzam Begg — to volunteer for an Islamic charity. As his British solicitor Gareth Peirce noted in the Guardian on Tuesday, “Their work was teaching the sons and daughters of Arabic-speaking expatriates in the capital,” but after 9/11 and the US-led invasion, “the school was flattened in the first days of the bombing.”

Shaker made sure his pregnant wife and their three young children were safe, but was seized by Afghan bounty hunters, at a time when bounty payments of $5,000 a head were widespread. He was then sold on to other bounty hunters on two occasions, and on the third occasion was bought by Northern Alliance soldiers, who eventually handed him over — or sold him — to US forces. Read the rest of this entry »

Below, I’m pleased to cross-post an interview conducted by phone with the journalist Brad Jacobson during my recent visit to the US to campaign for the closure of Guantánamo on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Bush administration’s brutal and lawless “war on terror” prison. The interview was conducted while I was in Washington D.C., and afterwards I was pleased to direct Brad to Truthout as a prospective publisher, and delighted that Truthout decided to run with it. It was published on Sunday, and I’ll let it speak for itself, after noting that I have made a few editorial changes, and have inserted some additional links as well.

Brad was a knowledgeable interviewer, and clearly interested in the horrors of America’s post-9/11 journey to the “dark side,” and the surreal situation we now find ourselves in, when a Democratic President, who campaigned largely on a promise to clear up the Bush administration’s mess, and to close Guantánamo, has largely failed to do so, and,perversely, has ended up normalizing much of what, under George W. Bush, had come to be regarded as a national shame.

Guantánamo Ten Years Later: “It’s a Disgrace,” Says Expert Andy Worthington
Interview by Brad Jacobson, Truthout, February 12, 2012

On January 12, the tenth anniversary of the notorious military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Truthout interviewed investigative journalist and Guantánamo expert Andy Worthington. Author of The Guantánamo Files and co-director of the film “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” Worthington has spent the last six years painstakingly working to keep alive in the public consciousness the human faces and personal contexts of the 779 people imprisoned within the facility. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month was the 10th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, and as this year progresses it is appropriate to remember that there will be other grim 10-year anniversaries to note.

Last week, one of those 10-year anniversaries passed almost unnoticed. On February 7, 2002, as Andrew Cohen noted in the Atlantic, in the only article marking the anniversary:

President George W. Bush signed a brief memorandum [PDF] titled “Humane Treatment of Taliban and al- Qaeda Detainees.” The caption was a cruel irony, an Orwellian bit of business, because what the memo authorized and directed was the formal abandonment of America’s commitment to key provisions of the Geneva Convention. This was the day, a milestone on the road to Abu Ghraib, that marked our descent into torture — the day, many would still say, that we lost part of our soul. Read the rest of this entry »

The new “Close Guantánamo” website, an initiative I was involved in launching last month, with a petition on the White House’s “We the People” website, has now entered a new phase — presenting the prisoners’ stories, as told by their attorneys — which is a project that, hopefully, will run throughout the year, and will feed into new campaigns and projects. Please sign up here if you’re interested in adding your voice, and in receiving regular updates.

In the meantime, to help promote the “Close Guantánamo” campaign and the prisoner profiles, I’m cross-posting below the introduction to the prisoner profiles and the first profile, a thorough and detailed account of Abdul Razak Qadir, one of five Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province) who are still held at Guantánamo, written by his attorney Seema Saifee. Please note that many of the links have been added especially for this cross-post.

Telling the Guantánamo Prisoners’ Stories: The 89 Men Cleared for Release
Close Guantánamo, February 8, 2012

When the “Close Guantánamo” website was established a month ago, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, we had two aims — to push for the closure of the prison, particularly by focusing on the injustice of holding 89 prisoners cleared for release, out of 171 prisoners in total; and to dispel the still prevalent myths about the prisoners being “the worst of the worst,” by telling their stories. Read the rest of this entry »

During my ten-day US tour last month to mark the 10th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, all the events I took part in, and the TV and radio interviews I undertook, were worthwhile, enjoyable, and an opportunity to provide important information and to urge those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo to keep campaigning for its closure.

This is not an easy task, given President Obama’s failures, cynical Congressional opposition, and the obstruction of right-wing judges in the D.C. Circuit Court — and it is compounded by a recent poll showing that a majority of Americans are apparently content for Guantánamo to remain open — but the 10th anniversary provided an opportunity to launch a new campaigning website, “Close Guantánamo” with the attorney Tom Wilner (and supporters can sign up here), and also to hook up with many other friends.

One of these is Jason Leopold, the lead investigative reporter for Truthout, who is a colleague and a friend with whom I spent some time in the fall of 2010, during “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and in the third of the four cities on my recent visit — San Francisco — Jason and I took part in an hour-long conversation, at UC Hastings Law School on January 13, which was one of the most satisfying of all my engagements, as Jason and I work well together, and had enough time to cover all the issues that need discussing, on this baleful anniversary when all three branches of the US government have failed to close Guantánamo, and too few people seem to care. Read the rest of this entry »