Late on Friday evening, RT published an article I had been commissioned to write for them, entitled, “In Guantánamo, fine words are no substitute for freedom.” In it, I examined in detail the parts of President Obama’s national security speech on Thursday that  dealt with the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where a prison-wide hunger strike has been raging for nearly four months.

The 166 men still held are expressing their despair at having been abandoned by all three branches of the US government — by President Obama and his administration, by Congress and by the judiciary, and for good reason — 86 of these men were cleared for release three years ago by an inter-agency task force that President Obama established when he took office in 2009, and most of the 80 others would be entirely justified in concluding that, in their cases, justice has gone AWOL.

A month ago, President Obama finally broke his silence on Guantánamo to deliver an eloquent speech at a news conference in which he explained why Guantánamo is such an abomination, but shied away from acknowledging his own part in the failure to close the prison, as he promised when he took office in 2009, and put the blame solely on Congress. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, President Obama delivered a major speech on national security issues. I leave it to some of my esteemed colleagues to analyze everything apart from the final section of the speech, in which the President spoke about “the detention of terrorist suspects,” with specific reference to my particular area of expertise, the lamentable “war on terror” prison that still exists at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

166 men are still held at Guantánamo, even though 86 of them were cleared for release over three years ago by an interagency task force established by President Obama when he took office in 2009. Failed by all three branches of the US government, the prisoners embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike on February 6, 2013, and it is the unprecedented global response to this hunger strike — domestically and globally — that provoked President Obama to rouse himself from his indifference — or, at best, his refusal to expend political capital on an issue that was not a vote-winner — and make concrete plans for revisiting his failed promise to close the prison, which he made on his first day in office.

Eloquent as ever, he called the prison at Guantánamo Bay “a facility that should never have been opened,” and responded to the tsunami of complaints over the last few months — from Sen. Carl Levin, Sen. Dianne Fenstein, the UN, the ICRC, the European Parliament, the liberal and establishment US media, the more than 215,000 signatories to a Change.org petition, and the more than 560,000 signatories to an Avaaz petition that was launched just yesterday — by apparently meeting two key demands, and hinting at action on a third. Read the rest of this entry »

As President Obama prepares to make a major speech on national security issues at the National Defense University — including his plans for Guantánamo, where a prison-wide hunger strike has been raging for over three months — the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, whose lawyers represent 15 of the remaining 166 prisoners at Guantánamo, has today publicized messages for the President from three of the men calling for urgent action to release prisoners and take steps towards the necessary closure of the prison, in unclassified notes of meetings and phone calls with their lawyers. The three are amongst the 86 prisoners cleared for release at least three years ago by an inter-agency task force established by President Obama when he took office in January 2009 but still held because of Obama’s own inertia, and obstruction by Congress and the courts.

Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, whose reports from the hunger strike are here, here, here and here, said to the President, “You need to hand over the 86 people who have been cleared,” adding, “In the end this place has no solution except close it down.”

Reprieve added that Aamer is “among the approximately 140 detainees in the prison on hunger strike” — a higher count than the 130 regularly cited by lawyers for the prisoners — and also pointed out that the UK government “has repeatedly said that they want [him] returned to his family in London.” Read the rest of this entry »

Please sign the Avaaz petition calling for the closure of Guantánamo!

Just hours before President Obama delivers a major speech on national security at the National Defense University, in which he will discuss the drone program and will also lay out his plans for Guantánamo, an international petition calling for the prison’s closure, launched by Avaaz, has secured over 400,000 signatures in just one day.

The petition calls on President Obama “to appoint a White House official whose responsibility it is to close down the prison, and to use the authority granted to you by the US Congress to immediately transfer the 86 men who have been cleared,” which is exactly the message that is required, so please, if you haven’t already signed it, do so now, and then circulate it to everyone you know.

For the first time since a prison-wide hunger strike began over three months ago, President Obama spoke about Guantánamo at a news conference three weeks ago, promising to tackle Congress, where lawmakers have passed legislation designed to prevent the release of prisoners and the closure of the prison, but refusing to acknowledge his own role in preventing the release of any of the 56 Yemeni prisoners, out of 86 prisoners cleared for release by his own inter-agency task force, and failing to mention that a waiver exists in the legislation relating to Guantánamo (the National Defense Authorization Act) that allows him to bypass Congress if he regards it as being “in the national security interests of the United States.” Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow, just before President Obama delivers a major speech on national security issues — including his policy on Guantánamo, still gripped by a prison-wide hunger strike by men in despair at ever being released or receiving justice — the European Parliament will be discussing and voting on a resolution reiterating previous calls for President Obama to close Guantánamo as he promised when he took office in January 2009.

Delayed from last month, this arrives at a perfect time, reminding President Obama that his obligations towards the men abandoned at Guantánamo — by all three branches of the US government over the last three years — are not just a domestic matter, but an international one, and that further delays in addressing the complaints of the hunger strikers are unconscionable.

In brief, 86 of the 166 men still held were cleared for release over three years ago by an inter-agency task force established by President Obama when he took office; 46 others were consigned to indefinite detention without charge or trial by President Obama in an executive order two years ago, when they were promised periodic reviews of their cases that have not taken place; and the rest were supposed to be put on trial, although only six have been charged. All the men, therefore, have legitimate reasons for feeling abandoned by their jailers, and for seeking immediate action to secure their release, a review of their cases, or fair trials. Read the rest of this entry »

100 days after the majority of the remaining 166 prisoners in Guantánamo embarked on a hunger strike, and after a weekend of actions in the US, the UK and elsewhere to highlight the continuing injustice of the prison, the world is waiting — again — to hear from President Obama.

As news of the hunger strike filtered out of the prison in late February, and, throughout March, spread like wildfire throughout the world’s media, attracting criticism of the administration from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations, as well as critical coverage in the US, President Obama remained silent.

Three weeks ago, President Obama finally broke his silence, delivering a speech at a news conference in which, as I explained here, he eloquently explained why Guantánamo is such an abomination, but failed to accept his own responsibility for the prison’s continued existence, blaming Congress and claiming that all he could do was to go back to lawmakers to seek their cooperation.

Whilst it is certainly true that lawmakers have raised huge obstacles to prevent the release of prisoners and the closure of the prison, it is also true that President Obama personally imposed a ban on releasing any of the cleared Yemenis who make up 56 of the 86 men still held whose release was recommended by the President’s own inter-agency task force back in January 2010, following a failed airline bomb plot on Christmas Day 2009, which was hatched in Yemen. Read the rest of this entry »

On the 100th day of the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo, please ask the US authorities to free prisoners and take concrete steps towards finally closing the prison. Call the White House (202-456-1111, 202-456-1414), US Southern Command (305-437-1213) and the Department of Defense (703-571-3343). You can say, “I support closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay. President Obama can and should resume transfers, today, for the 86 cleared prisoners who are still held. Indefinite detention without charge or trial is a human rights violation.” You can also call or e-mail your congressperson and senator to ask them to support swift executive action to close Guantánamo, and you can also send a letter to a prisoner.

To mark 100 days of the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo, events are — or have been — taking place in the US, the UK and worldwide, involving, amongst others, my friends and colleagues in Witness Against Torture, Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, World Can’t Wait and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture in the US, and the London Guantánamo Campaign and the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign in the UK.

In the US, the various groups delivered petitions to the White House containing over 370,000 signatures, including, in particular, the petition on Change.org initiated by Col. Morris Davis, which currently has over 200,000 signatures, and is still ongoing. In London, campaigners will be performing street theatre outside the US Embassy tomorrow (Saturday May 18) at 2pm. For further information, including other actions you can engage in, see the Witness Against Torture website, and Amnesty International’s Facebook page. Also see the video for “Hunger Strike Song” by the Peace Poets and Witness Against Torture.

Following the action in Washington D.C., the National Religious Campaign Against Torture sent out a press release, in which executive director Rev. Richard Killmer stated, “Years of detention without charge or trial have created a sense of desperation and hopelessness among the men at Guantánamo, which has led over 100 of them to join a hunger strike. The human crisis in Guantánamo is a moral one that needs to end immediately. The faith community calls on the President to close Guantánamo. It is the right thing to do.” Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

As the prison-wide hunger strike continues at Guantánamo, one of the key demands of campaigners — including myself and Tom Wilner, here at “Close Guantánamo” — has been for President Obama to appoint an official to oversee the closure of the prison, to replace Daniel Fried, the State Department official who oversaw the release of dozens of prisoners in 2009 and 2010, before Congress — and the President himself — raised obstacles to the release of prisoners.

Fried was reassigned in January this year, and no one was appointed to take his place, a message that was easily interpreted as a sign that President Obama and his administration had decided that the closure of Guantánamo was no longer a priority.

Yesterday, however, Attorney General Eric Holder told a news conference that, as Reuters reported it, the government “intends to revive a vacant position coordinating policy” for the prison at Guantánamo Bay. “We’re in the process of working on that now. We’re looking at candidates,” Holder told a news conference.

However, as Reuters added, “he did not say who the candidates were to fill the position of coordinating Guantánamo, or whether the person eventually appointed would work at the State Department, the White House or elsewhere.” Nevertheless, he stated that the administration will make “a renewed effort to close Guantánamo,” and, as Reuters noted, he also cited “the prison’s high cost and the impact on US relations with other nations.”

This is excellent news, although, as with President Obama’s fine words two weeks ago, it must be followed up with action. It is, however, a vindication for the more than 200,000 people who, in the last two weeks, have signed a petition on Change.org, launched by Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the military commissions at Guantánamo, calling for the appointment of a new official to drive the closure of the prison.

In addition, it is clearly also a response to high-level criticism from friends of the administration.

Sen. Carl Levin’s letter to the White House

Last Thursday, for example, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to the Obama administration in which he “urged the White House to appoint an official to spearhead an interagency effort to oversee the process of relocating detainees at Guantánamo Bay who have been cleared for transfer.” His press release also stated, “Levin fought for a national security waiver that provides for the transfer of detainees in appropriate cases. More than 80 detainees who have been cleared for transfer are still awaiting departure from Guantánamo. Expediting this process is critical to advancing the goal of closing GITMO, as the president has called for.”

The text of Levin’s letter to the White House — to Kathryn Ruemmler, Assistant to the President and Counsel to the President — was as follows:

Dear Ms. Ruemmler:

At a press conference last week, President Obama reaffirmed his commitment to close the detention facility at Guantánamo (GITMO) because, as he pointed out, it is expensive, inefficient, damaging to the United States’ international standing, reduces the cooperation of our allies in countering terrorism, and serves as a recruiting tool for extremists. The President said he had asked his staff to review all options for addressing the GITMO issue and expressed the desire to re-engage with Congress on this.

I recognize that Congress has made the process of relocating GITMO detainees to third countries more difficult by imposing certification requirements on such transfers. However, more than a year ago, I successfully fought for a national security waiver that provides a clear route for the transfer of detainees to third countries in appropriate cases, i.e., to make sure the certification requirements do not constitute an effective prohibition.

I urge the President to appoint an official inside the White House to spearhead an interagency effort to determine which of the more than eighty detainees who have already been cleared for transfer by the Guantánamo Detainee Review Task Force meet the certification (and waiver) requirements, and to actively work for their transfer. High level leadership on detainee transfers is critical to advancing the goal of closing GITMO.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Sincerely,

Carl Levin
Chairman

Harold Koh’s speech at the Oxford Union

In addition, Harold Koh, former Legal Advisor to the State Department, delivered a speech at the Oxford Union on May 7, in which he also called for the appointment of a senior official to oversee the closure of the prison.

Koh stated, “What the President’s team should recognize is that he does not need a new policy to close Guantánamo. He just needs to put the full weight of his office behind the sensible policy that he first announced in January 2009, reiterated at the National Archives in 2010, and reaffirmed in March 2011 … First, and foremost, he must appoint a senior White House official with the clout and commitment to actually make Guantánamo closure happen. There has not been such a person at the White House since Greg Craig left as White House Counsel in early 2010. There must be someone close to the President, with a broad enough mandate and directly answerable to him, who wakes up each morning thinking about how to shrink the Guantánamo population and close the camp.”

Koh proceeded to explain that this new Special Envoy “should work on the diplomatic steps needed to transfer either individually or en bloc some 86 detainees who were identified three years ago as eligible for repatriation to their home countries or resettlement elsewhere by an administration task force that exhaustively reviewed each prisoner’s file.”

He added, “The President should send the Envoy to Yemen to negotiate the block transfer, to a local rehabilitation facility, of those Yemeni detainees who were cleared for transfer, before those transfers were put on hold because of instability in that country” — echoing Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s recent call for renewed action to free the 86, who were cleared for release over three years ago by President Obama’s own inter-agency task force — and to resume transfers to Yemen of the 56 cleared prisoners who are Yemeni, and who, since President Obama imposed a ban on their release in the wake of the failed Christmas 2009 bomb plot, have been imprisoned on the basis of their nationality.

Providing further guidance, Koh stated, “Starting in 2010, Congress has used authorization bills to impose a series of counterproductive restrictions on the transfer of Guantánamo prisoners. But some of those restrictions are subject to waiver requirements and all must be construed in light of the President’s authority as commander-in- chief to regulate the movement of law-of-war detainees, as diplomat-in-chief to arrange diplomatic transfers, and as prosecutor-in-chief to determine who should be prosecuted and where. If Congress insists on passing such onerous and arguably unconstitutional conditions in the next National Defense Authorization Act, the President should call its bluff and forthrightly veto that legislation.”

Koh’s speech is also interesting for his thoughts on prosecutions and on the need for “periodic reviews” to be initiated for the 46 men who I recently described as the “forgotten prisoners” — those who, as Koh put it, the task force “concluded should remain held under rules of war that allow detention without charge for the duration of hostilities.”

*****

I urge those who are interested in the closure of Guantánamo to read Koh’s full speech, but for now the focus must be on finding an official to lead the closure of the prison, and not to allow the administration to take its eye off the ball, and on the need to release cleared prisoners as soon as possible.

As Tom Wilner, the co-founder of “Close Guantánamo,” who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in their cases before the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008, stated in response to the news:

What is happening at Guantanamo today is both a terrible human tragedy and a continuing outrage to our values as Americans. These few Arab men, many of whom have long been cleared of any wrongdoing, have been deprived of their liberty and of any opportunity to see their families for more than 11 years. They are stranded at an island prison and largely ignored because they have no US constituency to speak on their behalf.

He added:

That is no longer tolerable. The president has the authority under existing law to transfer these men from Guantánamo and to close this prison. He must exercise that authority and, as the critical first step, he must appoint someone in the White House with the responsibility for getting the job done.

We look forward to hearing that someone has been appointed to this critically important position, and encourage you to maintain the pressure on the administration by signing Col. Davis’s petition.

Note: For other perspectives on the need to appoint a senior official to oversee the closure of Guantánamo and for President Obama to act urgently to secure the release of cleared prisoners, please watch “Guantánamo: From Crisis to Solution,” a panel discussion put together by the Constitution Project,  the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and the New America Foundation, which took place in Washington D.C. on May 10, 2013, and was broadcast by C-SPAN.

The panel discussion featured Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA), a longtime advocate for the closure of the prison, General David R. Irvine, USA (Ret.), a former intelligence officer and expert in prisoner-of-war interrogation with the Sixth Army Intelligence School, and a member of the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment; Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, USA (Ret.), former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and a member of the Constitution Project’s Liberty and Security Committee; Dr. George Hunsinger, Hazel Thompson McCord Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and a founder of The National Religious Campaign Against Torture; Pardiss Kebriaei, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights; and Morris Davis, USA (Ret.), a former Air Force Colonel and the former Chief Prosecutor at the Office of Military Commissions at Guantánamo Bay. TCP Board member Kristine Huskey moderated the panel.

As the Constitution Project described it, Rep. Jim Moran “hosted a standing only briefing on Capitol Hill for Members of Congress and their staff,” in which the panel of experts “examined the ongoing hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay — which as of May 10 involved 100 of the 166 remaining detainees, 27 of whom were being force fed — and explored steps that can be taken to mitigate the current crisis, in particular by reducing the detainee population. All panelists agreed that President Obama must immediately begin transferring cleared detainees by exercising authority he has under current law.”

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the four-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

Please sign and share the petition on Change.org urging renewed action from President Obama to close Guantánamo, which now has over 200,000 signatures! Also please show your support for Shaker Aamer, if you can, by joining the protest outside Parliament from 12 noon to 3pm every weekday this week, and also next Monday and Tuesday (May 20-21), organised by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign. Also please note that, to mark the 100th day of the hunger strike, Witness Against Torture and other activists will be handing in the Change.org petition (and other petitions) to the White House at noon on May 17, and the London Guantánamo Campaign is staging a street theatre action outside the US Embassy at 2pm on Saturday May 18 (see the Facebook page). Please also sign the international petition to the British and American governments calling for Shaker’s release.

The quote in the title of this article is from 1984 (aka Nineteen Eighty-Four), George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, published in June 1949, which Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, described as being “probably the book I’ve read more than any other but the Holy Koran” in a recent letter to his family from Guantánamo.

I recently wrote about the latest developments — or the lack of them — in Shaker’s case, which continues to be a transatlantic game of political football, in which responsibility for his continued detention, six years after he was first cleared for release, is bounced from Washington to London and back with no regard for Shaker’s ongoing suffering or the injustice of holding a man who has long been cleared for release.

Shaker’s suffering — and the injustice of holding a man long cleared for release — are part of a much bigger story, of course, in which a prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo, involving the majority of the 166 prisoners still held, is now in its fourth month, and 85 of those men — in addition to Shaker — are also being held despite being cleared for release, through inaction on the part of President Obama and obstruction in Congress, all of which can be overcome if the political will exists. Read the rest of this entry »

Please sign and share the petition on Change.org urging renewed action from President Obama to close Guantánamo, which now has over 200,000 signatures! Also please show your support for Shaker Aamer, if you can, by joining the protest outside Parliament from 12 noon to 3pm every weekday this week, and also next Monday and Tuesday (May 20-21), organised by the Save Shaker Aamer Campaign. Also please note that, to mark the 100th day of the hunger strike, Witness Against Torture and other activists will be handing in the Change.org petition (and other petitions) to the White House at noon on May 17, and the London Guantánamo Campaign is staging a street theatre action outside the US Embassy at 2pm on Saturday May 18 (see the Facebook page). Please also sign the international petition to the British and American governments calling for Shaker’s release.

Although the prison-wide hunger strike at Guantánamo is still raging, and President Obama spoke eloquently last week about the need for the prison to be closed, it remains painfully true that, for the 86 prisoners (out of 166 in total), who were cleared for release by an inter-agency task force that President Obama established in 2009, there is still no easy route out.

The case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, ought to be the easiest to resolve. One of the 86, his return has regularly been requested since August 2007 by the British government, and the legislative obstacles raised by Congress to prevent the release of prisoners to countries they regard as dangerous doesn’t apply in Shaker’s case — the UK, after all, where his wife and children live, and are all British citizens, is America’s staunchest ally in the “war on terror,” and more than capable of keeping Shaker under surveillance if that were to be requested.

In the UK, pressure has been mounting for Shaker’s release. Last month, a petition to the British government, calling for renewed action to get him released, secured the 100,000 signatures necessary to trigger a Parliamentary debate (see here and here for the transcript), and it is to be hoped that a full Parliamentary debate will follow later this month or in June. Read the rest of this entry »