I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 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.

In a busy week for news relating to Guantánamo, the most significant development was the court-ordered release of the names of 55 of the 86 prisoners who have been cleared for release from Guantánamo but are still held.

Beginning this coming week, and in the weeks to come, we will be analyzing this list in detail, telling the stories of many of these men, but what we can note upfront is that 28 of the 55 names were featured in our groundbreaking report in June, “Guantánamo Scandal: The 40 Prisoners Still Held But Cleared for Release At Least Five Years Ago.”

Adnan Latif: Please sign the open letter

For now, however, we’d like to revisit the story of Adnan Latif, the mentally troubled Yemeni man who died at Guantánamo two weeks ago, and to call your attention to an open letter and petition to the US government issued by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Please sign and circulate it, if you can. Read the rest of this entry »

This investigative report is published simultaneously here, and on the website of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which I established in January 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.

One of the greatest injustices at Guantánamo is that, of the 169 prisoners still held, over half — 87 in total — were cleared for release by President Obama’s interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force. The Task Force involved around 60 career officials from various government departments and the intelligence agencies, who spent the first year of the Obama Presidency reviewing the cases of all the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo, to decide whether they should be tried, released, or, in some cases, held indefinitely without charge or trial. The Task Force’s final report is here (PDF).

Exactly who these 87 men are is a closely held secret on the part of the administration, which is unfortunate for those of us working towards the closure of Guantánamo, as it prevents us from campaigning as effectively as we would like for the majority of these men, given that we are not entirely sure of their status. Attorneys for the prisoners have been told about their clients’ status, but that information — as with so much involving Guantánamo — is classified.

However, through recent research — into the classified military files about the Guantánamo prisoners, compiled by the Joint Task Force at the prison, which were released last year by WikiLeaks, as well as documents made available by the Bush administration, along with some additional information from the years of the Obama administration — I have been able to establish the identities of 40 men — 23 Yemenis, and 17 from other countries — who, between 2004 and 2009, were cleared for release by the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo, by military review boards under the Bush administration, or by President Obama’s Task Force, and to identify the official documents in which these decisions were noted. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 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.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” in the latest article in our ongoing series telling the stories of prisoners cleared for release but still held at Guantánamo, we are focusing this week on Nabil Hadjarab, a 30-year old Algerian, who has been held for nearly a third of his life at Guantánamo, despite being cleared for release over five years ago — in April 2007 — when the US authorities acknowledged that he was not a threat, and had no useful intelligence.

Unfortunately, although Nabil spent much of his life in France, where most of his family members live, and are French citizens, he has been spurned by the French government, despite pleading for assistance from President Sarkozy in September 2010 — and being swiftly turned down.

Nabil’s connections to France are considerable. His grandfather, Mohamed Ben Said Ben Sliman, who was born in Algeria in 1894, spent three years during the First World War fighting for France, and his father, Saïd Hadjarab, fought for France during Algeria’s War of Independence, and was a member of General de Gaulle’s Republican Guard. Read the rest of this entry »

As published on the “Close Guantánamo” website. Please join us — just an email address required.

On March 30, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a key part of the Organization of American States (OAS), issued what was described as “a landmark admissibility report” in the case of Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian held at Guantánamo, who, like the majority of the 171 men still held, has been detained for over ten years without charge or trial. The IACHR is one of the principal autonomous bodies of the OAS, whose mission is “to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere.” Its resolutions are binding on the US, which is a member state. As Djamel’s lawyers at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) explained in a press release:

This ruling marks the first time the IACHR has accepted jurisdiction over the case of a man detained at Guantánamo, and underscores the fact that there has been no effective domestic remedy available to victims of unjust detentions and other abuses at the base. The IACHR will now move to gather more information on the substantive human rights law violations suffered by Djamel Ameziane — including the harsh conditions of confinement he has endured, the abuses inflicted on him, and the illegality of his detention.

The IACHR will specifically review the US government’s failure to transfer Djamel Ameziane or any man detained at Guantánamo for more than a year — the longest period of time without a transfer since the prison opened in January 2002. This failure has moved the United States further out of compliance with international human rights law and the precautionary measures issued by the IACHR to Djamel Ameziane (2008) and other detained men (2002). Read the rest of this entry »

Since July 2008, when the first Algerian prisoners were repatriated from Guantánamo, the position taken by the US government — first under George W. Bush, and, for the last three years, under Barack Obama — has been that Algeria is a safe country for the repatriation of prisoners cleared for release.

Lawyers and NGOs aware of Algeria’s poor human rights record disagreed, as did some of the Algerian prisoners themselves, to the extent that the last two Algerians sent home — Abdul Aziz Naji in July 2010 and Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed in January 2011 — had actively resisted being sent home, and had taken their cases all the way to the US Supreme Court, which had paved the way for their enforced return by refusing to accept their appeals.

In assessing whether or not it was safe for Algerians to be repatriated from Guantánamo, the US government was required to weigh Algeria’s established reputation for using torture against the “diplomatic assurances” agreed between Washington and Algiers, whereby, as an Obama administration official told the Washington Post at the time of Naji’s repatriation, the Algerian government had promised that prisoners returned from Guantánamo “would not be mistreated.” The US official added, “We take some care in evaluating countries for repatriation. In the case of Algeria, there is an established track record and we have given that a lot of weight. The Algerians have handled this pretty well: You don’t have recidivism and you don’t have torture.” Read the rest of this entry »