Archive for January, 2011

Last Tuesday, while activists, journalists and lawyers were holding a rally outside The White House to ask President Obama to honor his pledge to close Guantánamo, and to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining 173 prisoners, Judge Richard Leon, in the District Court down the road, refused to grant the habeas petition of an Algerian prisoner in Guantánamo (PDF), bringing the total of government victories in the habeas litigation to 20, out of 58 cases decided to date.

Abdul Razak Ali, a 40-year old Algerian, whose real name is, apparently, Saeed Bakhouche, never stood a chance of winning his habeas petition, as it was his great misfortune to have been staying at a house in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, when it was raided by Pakistani forces, and he, along with several other men staying in the house, were seized and sent to Guantánamo.

For Ali, the biggest problem was not these other men (although many of them came to be regarded as significant figures), but the fact that another man, touted as the biggest catch in the raid, was Abu Zubaydah, a Saudi-born Palestinian who had served as a gatekeeper for a training camp in Afghanistan.

After the raid, Zubaydah was immediately flown to Thailand, where a plan to torture him — later applied to dozens more “high-value detainees” seized in the “War on Terror” — was implemented, which was formally approved by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — in what are now referred to as the “torture memos” — on August 1, 2002. Zubaydah eventually surfaced at Guantánamo in September 2006, with 13 other “high-value detainees” previously held in secret CIA prisons, but others seized in the raid were even less fortunate. A handful of other prisoners seized with Zubaydah, including at least one teenager, were rendered to a torture prison in Syria, never to be seen or heard from again.

Why Abdul Razak Ali may not be as significant as the US alleges

Ali arrived at Guantánamo in June 2002, after being subjected to abuse in Pakistani custody and in US custody in Afghanistan, and has, presumably, always been thought of as being part of a group associated with Abu Zubyadah, even though there are verifiable problems with this presumption.

The first is that, when four of the other men seized in the raid were put forward for a trial by Military Commission in June 2008, he was not included; the second is that, in November 2008, another Algerian seized in the house, Labed Ahmed, was freed, after the Bush administration accepted his explanation that he had been delivered to the house by mistake, but had nevertheless been allowed to stay; and the third is because the government’s reliance on claims that Abu Zubaydah was a significant terrorist have been thoroughly discredited.

In its allegations against Ali, the government contended that:

[He] was a member of Abu Zubaydah’s force that was reorganizing at a guesthouse in Faisalabad, Pakistan, and preparing for future operations against US and Allied forces. In particular, the Government contends that the petitioner: (1) lived with Abu Zubaydah and a cadre of his lieutenants during a two week period; (2) previously traveled with Abu Zubaydah’s force through Afghanistan and ultimately fled with them through Afghanistan to Pakistan; and (3) took an English course (with an American accent) when he was staying at Abu Zubaydah’s guesthouse.

In response, Ali stated that:

Although he acknowledges being captured in the same guesthouse as Abu Zubaydah, he denies: (1) ever being in Afghanistan, let alone being with Abu Zubaydah’s force there; (2) ever taking an English course from Abu Zubaydah’s trainers at the guesthouse; and (3) ever being a member, permanent or otherwise, of Abu Zubaydah’s force. In essence, he claims that the Government has mistakenly identified him as a member of Abu Zubaydah’s force, who traveled with Abu Zubaydah in Afghanistan and fled with him to Pakistan before gathering at this particular guesthouse to start preparing for their next offensive against US and Allied forces.

In denying Ali’s habeas claim, Judge Leon failed to recognize that, if he was so significant, he would, in all likelihood, have been put forward for a trial by Military Commission in May or June 2008, when four other men seized in the raid — Noor Uthman Muhammed (from Sudan), Ghassan al-Sharbi and Jabran al-Qahtani (both Saudis), and Sufyian Barhoumi (another Algerian) — were charged. In addition, he might also have recognized that Labed Ahmed (also captured in the house and also not put forward for a trial by Military Commissions) had spelled out how he had been staying at the house but had not been involved in any way with Abu Zubaydah.

Before his release in November 2008, after being “approved for transfer” by a military review board, Ahmed explained how he had ended up at Zubaydah’s house by accident, and how he had been allowed to stay, despite not knowing anyone in the house, for 12 days — a stay that would clearly have lasted longer had the house not been raided.

After explaining that he had traveled from Germany to Afghanistan at the start of September 2001, and had left for Pakistan in December, Ahmed said that he had stayed for three months in safe houses in Bannu and Lahore, and had then been advised to go to Faisalabad, where some people would come to give him his passport and send him back to Germany. He explained that he was with two other people, a Russian and a Yemeni, but that, after they arrived at Shabaz Cottage (the house where he was captured with Zubaydah and the others), they were told that they had been brought there by mistake and would be moved to another house after the evening prayer.

As I explained in an article after Ahmed’s release:

Ahmed insisted that he didn’t want to leave, because the previous houses had been crowded, whereas this house was “big and nice” and “everybody had their own room,” and explained that he refused to leave in the vehicle that was brought in the evening. Several days later, he said, “The guy from al-Qaeda, Daoud [identified in the hearing as Zubaydah] questioned me as to who I was, what I was doing here and who brought me. I said I’m from Germany waiting on my passport. When I get it, I will leave. He said, no problem, you can stay here for a week. I stayed there for about 12 days and the Pakistani police came. They took us to prison. Daoud was arrested with us, you can ask him about us.”

While this example should have provided a precedent for Judge Leon, he chose to ignore it, describing “the obvious and common-sense inference that a terrorist leader like Abu Zubaydah would not tolerate an unknown and untrusted stranger to dwell in a modest, two-story guesthouse for two weeks with himself and ten or so of his senior leadership, while they [were] preparing for their next operation against US and Allied forces.”

How the US courts are ignoring the bitter truth about Abu Zubaydah

Leon also chose to focus on the Washington courts’ history of believing a discredited narrative about Abu Zubaydah. As I have been explaining in articles for many years, Zubaydah, although intitially considered as a senior al-Qaeda operative — perhaps even the number three in the organization — was no such thing, and was, instead, the mentally damaged gatekeeper for a training camp, Khaldan, that had little to do with al-Qaeda, and was, in fact, closed down by the Taliban in 2000 after its emir, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, refused to cooperate with Osama bin Laden.

In 2006, the author Ron Suskind reported in his book The One Percent Doctrine that FBI agents, who had been involved in Zubaydah’s interrogations before the CIA’s torturers took over, had concluded that he was mentally ill, and was not a major player in al-Qaeda, and further statements from knowledgeable insiders downplaying Zubaydah’s alleged role were the focus of articles in the Washington Post in December 2007 and March 2009.

By October 2009, the government officially conceded that Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda. In response to 213 requests by his lawyers for discovery in his habeas corpus petition, officials turned down the requests by stating (PDF) that it “has not contended … that Petitioner was a member of al-Qaeda or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaeda” and “has not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, or the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

This was enormously significant, although it was entirely ignored by the D.C. Circuit Court in June last year, as I explained in a detailed article last July, In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies. In that article, I noted that, in reviewing an appeal by Sufyian Barhoumi, who lost his habeas petition in September 2009, the court claimed, based on long-discredited information, that Zubaydah was “the person in charge” of the Khaldan training camp, and that he was “an associate of [Osama bin Laden]” who “coordinates and cooperates with [bin Laden] in the conduct of training and trainee movements between [redacted] camps and al-Qaeda camps.”

For his part, Judge Leon also chose to ignore this evidence, not only describing Zubaydah as a “terrorist leader” (as mentioned above), but also citing a District Court opinion from last May, in which it was stated, “There appears to be no dispute that Abu Zubaydah was an al-Qaeda operative and that al-Qaeda-related activities took place in his [Faisalabad] house.” He also drew on the Circuit Court’s ruling in Barhoumi’s appeal, stating:

It is worth noting that our Circuit Court has unequivocally recognized that Abu Zubaydah and his band of followers have well established ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban and thus constitute an “associated force” under the AUMF [the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which is used by the government to justify the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo]. See Barhoumi v. Obama (affirming the district court’s conclusion that Barhoumi was part of “Abu Zubaydah’s militia — an ‘associated force that was engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners'” and affirming denial of petitioner Barhoumi’s writ).

Why the government’s new ploy in Abu Zubaydah’s case is troubling

Here, the problem is not only Judge Leon’s reliance on a discredited appraisal of Zubaydah’s significance, but a new ploy introduced by the government after it acknowledged that Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda, which first surfaced in its response to Zubaydah’s lawyers in October 2009, and was then used in Barhoumi’s case. In this new scenario, the government claimed that the ongoing detention of Abu Zubaydah was “based on conduct and actions that establish [that he] was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” and that he “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

Zubaydah’s lawyers countered this by stating that “the persons whom [Zubaydah] assisted in escaping Afghanistan in 2001 included ‘women, children, and/or other non-combatants’” and that the government has “evidence to support those assertions,” but in Barhoumi’s case, the government pushed the line that Zubaydah “was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” persuading the judges to accept, as evidence, the diary of an alleged associate of Zubaydah, Abu Kamil al-Suri, to demonstrate that Zubaydah was in charge of a militia, which included Sufyian Barhoumi.

As I explained at the time, “Whether there is any truth in this is difficult to ascertain, as Abu Kamil al-Suri is not available to ask about his diary, [because] his whereabouts are unknown.” I also noted other problems:

Al-Suri’s diary also identifies 15 members of what is described as “Zubaydah’s militia,” although, in the translation of al-Suri’s own words, it is described, less spectacularly, as a “group,” and a fractious one, moreover, with al-Suri noting that several of the members were “trying to take over this group,” to “lead us to join Sheikh Osama bin Laden.”

Nevertheless, the shadowy figure of Abu Kamil al-Suri and his dubious diary resurfaced in Abdul Razak Ali’s habeas petition, clearly exciting Judge Leon, who noted that a man with the same alleged alias used by Ali — Usama al Jaza’iri — was listed “as a permanent member of Abu Zubaydah’s group,” and “also placed him in at least one of the same locations in which [an] eyewitness identified him.”

Why Judge Leon’s reliance on eyewitnesses is of dubious value, and why the goverment’s withdrawal of a key witness is unacceptable

Judge Leon was also happy to accept the word of the eyewitness mentioned above, and others included in the government’s submissions, describing “credible accounts by fellow guesthouse dwellers who not only positively identified the petitioner by one of the various names he was using at that time — i. e., Abdul Razak — but who also credibly account for petitioner participating in one of Abu Zubaydah’s various training programs while he was staying in the guesthouse (i.e., taking a class in English).”

The obvious problem with these accounts is the suspicion that the eyewitnesses — the “fellow guesthouse dwellers” described by Judge Leon — may not have produced their statements willingly. This is particularly true if one of them was Abu Zubaydah, as the extent of his torture and the false confessions it yielded has been thoroughly established over the years, but there are also reasons to suspect that any of the four men put forward for trials by Military Commission in 2008 (who are the likely source of the statements) would also have been subjected to interrogations in conditions that ought to cast doubt on the veracity of their allegations.

For Abdul Razak Ali, the only hope now is that an appeal willl be successful. This seems unlikely, in light of the D.C. Circuit Court’s bullish assertions that the government has more rights to continue holding priosners at Guantánamo than it has asserted itself, but there is clearly a flaw in Ali’s case, beyond the obvious problems with the statements of his “fellow guesthouse dwellers” — namely, that, on December 24, the government withdrew a key allegation on which, until that date, it had been relying, having discovered that it contained “potentially exculpatory information that the Government had not turned over to detainee counsel because it was classified at a higher classification level than detainee counsel was authorized to view.”

That statement, made by another Guantánamo prisoner who was not even seized with Zubaydah and Ali, but was captured in a house raid in Karachi six months later, apparently related to a claim by the prisoner in quesion that he had seen Ali in Afghanistan, and its removal not only emphasizes the general unreliability of the government’s supposed evidence, but also indicates how difficult it is for prisoners’ defense teams to be sure that they have been given given access to all the exculpatory material they need to defend their clients.

In any other circumstance, the withdrawal of a key piece of evidence would have led to a new hearing, but with Guantánamo the normal rules do not apply, and while Abdul Razak Ali clearly has grounds to appeal, it seems unlikely that he will be able to dislodge the lies and misconceptions about Abu Zubaydah that have become accepted in the D.C. Circuit Court, or to challenge the dubious nature of statements made by his fellow prisoners, or that he will be able to succeed in reminding judges about the clear precedent for releasing a man who had nothing to do with Abu Zubaydah, as was established in the case of Labed Ahmed.

Two years and seven months after the Supreme Court granted constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights to the Guantánamo prisoners, it is impossible to conclude that, for the majority of the men who have lost their petitions (including Abdul Razak Ali), anything resembling justice has been delivered.

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

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

For an overview of all the habeas rulings, including links to all my articles, and to the judges’ unclassified opinions, see: Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List. For a sequence of articles dealing with the Guantánamo habeas cases since the start of 2010, see: Appeals Court Extends President’s Wartime Powers, Limits Guantánamo Prisoners’ Rights (January 2010), Fear and Paranoia as Guantánamo Marks its Eighth Anniversary (January 2010), Rubbing Salt in Guantánamo’s Wounds: Task Force Announces Indefinite Detention (January 2010), The Black Hole of Guantánamo (March 2010), Guantánamo Uighurs Back in Legal Limbo (March 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: The Torture Victim and the Taliban Recruit (April 2010), An Insignificant Yemeni at Guantánamo Loses His Habeas Petition (April 2010), With Regrets, Judge Allows Indefinite Detention at Guantánamo of a Medic (April 2010), Mohamedou Ould Salahi: How a Judge Demolished the US Government’s Al-Qaeda Claims (April 2010), Judge Rules Yemeni’s Detention at Guantánamo Based Solely on Torture (April 2010), Why Judges Can’t Free Torture Victims from Guantánamo (April 2010), How Binyam Mohamed’s Torture Was Revealed in a US Court (May 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Consigning Soldiers to Oblivion (May 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of an Ill and Abused Libyan in Guantánamo (May 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Russian Caught in Abu Zubaydah’s Web (May 2010), No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court (June 2010), Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo? (June 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: 2 Years, 50 Cases, 36 Victories for the Prisoners (June 2010), Obama Thinks About Releasing Innocent Yemenis from Guantánamo (June 2010), Calling for US Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (June 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Yemeni Seized in Iran, Held in Secret CIA Prisons (July 2010), Innocent Student Finally Released from Guantánamo (July 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals (Part One) (July 2010), Obama and US Courts Repatriate Algerian from Guantánamo Against His Will; May Be Complicit in Torture (July 2010), In Abu Zubaydah’s Case, Court Relies on Propaganda and Lies (July 2010), Guantánamo and Habeas Corpus: Prisoners Win 3 out of 4 Cases, But Lose 5 out of 6 in Court of Appeals (Part Two) (July 2010), Judge Orders Release from Guantánamo of Mentally Ill Yemeni; 2nd Judge Approves Detention of Minor Taliban Recruit (August 2010), Judge Denies Habeas Petition of Afghan Shopkeeper at Guantánamo (September 2010), Nine Years After 9/11, US Court Concedes that International Laws of War Restrict President’s Wartime Powers (September 2010), Fayiz Al-Kandari, A Kuwaiti Aid Worker in Guantánamo, Loses His Habeas Petition (September 2010), Heads You Lose, Tails You Lose: The Betrayal of Mohamedou Ould Slahi (September 2010), First Guantánamo Habeas Appeal to US Supreme Court (Fayiz al-Kandari, October 2010), Former Guantánamo Prisoner, Tortured by Al-Qaeda and the US, Launches Futile Attempt to Hold America Accountable (Abdul Rahim al-Ginco/al-Janko, October 2010), Judge Denies Guantánamo Prisoner’s Habeas Petition, Ignores Torture in Secret CIA Prisons (Tawfiq al-Bihani, October 2010), Court Orders Rethink on Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner’s Successful Habeas Petition (Mohamedou Ould Slahi, November 2010).

POSTSCRIPT January 24: Please see this Facebook page for an update of the campaign to write to every prisoner that was initiated by Facebook friends last June, as mentioned below. And please contact Shahrina to let her know if you’re writing to a prisoner, and, if so, who you’re writing to.

In the Guardian‘s Comment is free yesterday, Cortney Busch of Reprieve, the London-based legal action charity whose lawyers represent 15 of the remaining 173 prisoners in Guantánamo, encouraged Guardian readers to write to prisoners who might be losing hope because of the failure of the Obama administration to close the prison as promised — and as I described in my recent articles, Guantánamo Forever? and The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo.

Writing to the prisoners is an excellent idea, and one that I last helped promote last June, when some Facebook friends and activists took it upon themselves to encourage people to write to all the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo. I’m also pleased to have helped to encourage people to write to prisoners through my involvement in the creation of a short film of former prisoner Omar Deghayes showing cards and letters he received while in Guantánamo, and speaking about what they meant to him and to the other prisoners, which was filmed as part of the making of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” and is included in the promotion for Amnesty International’s letter-writing campaign.

I’m pleased, therefore, to cross-post Cortney’s article below — and am also pleased that she specifically mentioned Younous Chekkouri, described as “one of the most peaceful and cooperative” prisoners, whose calmness and intelligence struck me when I was researching my book The Guantánamo Files five years ago, and trawling through the publicly available documents released (after a lawsuit) by the Pentagon.

I was delighted to hear that Younous “comes to each attorney meeting with a stack of pictures of roses to distribute to [Cortney’s] Reprieve colleagues as tokens of thanks,” and also to discover that he is a Sufi — something that, in all these years, I had never discovered. However, I also fear that, despite his formidable inner peace, and his valid explanations for being in Afghanistan (available here), Younous is regarded as one of the 48 prisoners that the Obama administration intends to hold indefinitely without charge or trial.

Pen pals can give hope to Guantánamo prisoners
Cortney Busch, The Guardian, January 18, 2011

The latest US legislation is causing dozens held at Guantánamo Bay to lose hope — but you can make a difference

When Reprieve attorney Cori Crider met her youngest client, 19-year-old Mohammed el Gharani, before his release from Guantánamo Bay in 2009, he made an unexpected request. He asked if she knew how he could get hold of some books, ideally on history or politics, to help him prepare himself for the outside world.

Mohammed had been sold to the US for a bounty when he was just 14, and spent his school years in Guantánamo’s military prison. He was worried that he would appear ignorant when he emerged. Reprieve put out a call and was quickly inundated with donated books, which Mohammed received with delight. But what encouraged him most were the hundreds of notes scrawled inside the covers — messages of humanity and kindness that Guantánamo prisoners rarely, if ever, receive.

Today Mohammed is a free man, and working hard at setting up his own laundrette in Chad. But many of his fellow detainees remain imprisoned — and have just been dealt a fresh and crushing blow. The National Defense Authorization Act 2011, recently signed into US law, bans the use of military funds to bring Guantánamo prisoners before US civilian courts — and makes releasing the 89 men who are already cleared to leave much more difficult. President Obama has criticised these provisions, promising to repeal them or to mitigate their effects. But for the moment the mood among Guantánamo’s prisoners is distinctly gloomy. This is why Reprieve is now asking people to take the unusual step of writing them letters of support.

A Guantánamo pen pal may seem a daunting prospect, but from my trips to the island prison over the past year I can personally recommend Younous Chekkouri, widely regarded as one of the most peaceful and cooperative detainees. He bears no ill will towards Americans and comes to each attorney meeting with a stack of pictures of roses to distribute to my Reprieve colleagues as tokens of thanks. Far from being a violent jihadi, Younous is a Sufi — a strikingly benign strand of Islam that values love and peace above all.

So how did such a person end up in Guantánamo? Much like Mohammed el Gharani, Younous was “sold” to the Americans. When the US declared war on Afghanistan in 2001, Younous and his wife fled Kabul for Pakistan, only to find that men of Arabic descent had become precious commodities. American forces were offering bounties of $5,000 (£3,125) per head to anyone who handed over a “terrorist”. The fliers offering the money promised schools, doctors, housing and unimaginable wealth for the reader and the community. Hundreds of people were rounded up, arrested en masse and sold to the US, and Younous found himself caught up in one of these sweeps and ultimately transferred to Guantánamo Bay.

Almost nine years later, Younous, like dozens of other men still held at Guantánamo, has never been charged with a crime or given the chance to clear his name. In fact, his challenge to his detention has only just reached the courtroom. As a member of Younous’s legal team, I know we have a good case that should soon, by rights, set him free. But I also know that Younous, like the other 172 men left in Guantánamo, is now beginning to despair of ever being released.

For many of these men, the last eight or nine years have been spent hundreds of miles from family and friends, without compassion and very little hope. Yet these are perhaps their darkest days yet. Please consider writing one of them a letter. As with the messages scrawled in Mohammed’s books, even the smallest word of encouragement lets them know they are not forgotten.

For details on how to write to one of Guantánamo’s “forgotten” prisoners, please visit this page on Reprieve’s website.

Note: Reprieve’s initiative contains the names and brief stories of some of the 173 men still held, and the following instructions for those planning to write:

Please address all letters to:

Detainee Name
Detainee ISN
Guantánamo Bay
P.O. Box 160
Washington, D.C. 20053
United States of America

Include a return address on the envelope.

Further information about prisoners to whom readers might want to write is available on the page I compiled last June for a similar project, Write to the Forgotten Prisoners in Guantánamo, and more detailed information about the men still held can be found in my nine-part series profiling the men still held, available via the following page: Introducing the Definitive List of the Remaining Prisoners in Guantánamo.

And finally, the short video below is of Mohammed El-Gharani thanking supporters for the many books that they sent him after Reprieve launched a campaign to help him:

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

Between January 18 and 21, a number of campaigning groups in the U.S. — No More Guantánamos, Witness Against Torture, the Defending Dissent Foundation, High Road for Human Rights Education Project, and WarIsACrime.org — are asking supporters to call Congress to ask their Senators and Representatives to help close Guantánamo by lifting a ban on the transfer of cleared prisoners, charging or releasing the men still held, allowing federal court trials for men alleged to have been involved in terorist activities, and resisting attempts to expand the use of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the founding document of the “War on Terror,” passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks — which, if there is to be any lasting justice, should be repealed rather than expanded.

I urge any concerned American reading this to take part, as it is a vital initiatve, reflecting the concerns voiced in a statement, “Close Guantánamo with Justice Now,” which was prepared by a number of groups — including the Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International USA and Witness Against Torture — to mark the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo last week, and which also reflects the concerns I voiced in my recent articles, Guantánamo Forever? and The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo.

Close Guantanamo Call-In Week, January 18-21, 2011

Congress has taken steps to restrict funding for closing Guantánamo. It has limited the Administration’s ability to transfer detainees to other countries, and it has created barriers to transferring detainees to the United States — even for the purpose of trial. Some members of Congress are working on ways to update and expand the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) in an effort to further expand the use of military commissions, preventive detention and even extra-judicial killing of U.S. citizens.

These are policies rooted in fear rather than wisdom.

No More Guantánamos asks you to take part in a national call-in week to Congress, along with Witness Against Torture, the Defending Dissent Foundation, High Road for Human Rights Education Project, and WarIsACrime.org.

Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121. Ask to speak to each of your Senators and your Representative. (Find out who they are here.)

Call your Senators and your Representative today to demand their support for closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay with justice, specifically:

• Drop ban on transfers of detainees.
• Charge or release the men still in detention.
• Allow civilian trials of men who are charged with crimes.
• Do not expand the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF).

Maintaining the detention center at Guantánamo Bay does not make us safer. Because it stands as an internationally recognized symbol of a period in which our nation abandoned one of its greatest values — respect for the basic dignity of all people — and tortured detainees, Guantánamo serves to inspire those who seek to harm us. More importantly, it endures as a legacy of a period in which our government put its fears ahead of our values.

Thank you for all you do. Please send us an email message after you have made your calls, letting us know how many calls you made and how they went.

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

For several years now, one organization in the US government has persistently undermined attempts to have a grown-up debate about the perceived dangerousness of prisoners at Guantánamo, and the need to bear security concerns in mind whilst also trying to empty the prison and to bring to an end this particularly malign icon of the Bush administration’s ill-conceived response to the 9/11 attacks.

That organization is the Pentagon, and its habit of issuing announcements regarding the alleged recidivism of prisoners released from Guantánamo — without documentation to back up its claims — has also exposed a startling lack of journalistic integrity in the mainstream media. Although the Pentagon had regularly drip-fed alarmist reports about recidivism into the media during the Bush administration, which were picked up and reported despite their lack of sources and their often contradictory nature — as explained in a detailed report by researchers at the Seton Hall Law School in New Jersey (PDF) — the propaganda war has become noticeably more bold under President Obama.

The first report under Obama, issued on May 21, 2009, gained high-profile approval when, to its shame, the New York Times uncritically published a front-page story entitled, “1 In 7 Detainees Rejoined Jihad, Pentagon Finds,” in which Elisabeth Bumiller, relying on an advance copy of a Pentagon report, stated that “74 prisoners released from Guantánamo have returned to terrorism, making for a recidivism rate of nearly 14 percent.”

In fact, the Pentagon had only provided names and “confirmation” for 27 of the 74 prisoners cited in the report, and there were doubts about the recidivism of some of the 27 prisoners named in the report, as was revealed a week later, when the Times allowed Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation to write an op-ed criticizing Bumiller’s article, in which they concluded, from an examination of the report (PDF), that a more probable figure for recidivism — based on the fact that there were “12 former detainees who can be independently confirmed to have taken part in terrorist acts directed at American targets, and eight others suspected of such acts” — was “about 4 percent of the 534 men who have been released.”

The Times later apologized by publishing an Editor’s Note, noting that its original article should have stated that “about one in 20 of former Guantánamo prisoners described in the Pentagon report were now said to be engaging in terrorism,” but as I explained at the time, the damage had already been done, as it led directly to the following assertion by former Vice President Dick Cheney, discussing the prisoners still held at Guantánamo:

Keep in mind that these are hardened terrorists picked up overseas since 9/11. The ones that were considered low-risk were released a long time ago. And among these, we learned yesterday, many were treated too leniently, because 1 in 7 cut a straight path back to their prior line of work and have conducted murderous attacks in the Middle East.

More importantly, the Times story conveniently appeared on the front page on the day that President Obama delivered a major national security speech at the National Archives, reviving the much-criticized Military Commissions at Guantánamo (which he had suspended on his first day in office), and also alerting the world to his depressing plans to hold some prisoners at Guantánamo indefinitely without charge or trial. These developments were profoundly dispiriting to those who hoped that Obama would thoroughly reverse and repudiate the Bush administration’s innovations regarding detention policies and trials for prisoners seized in the “War on Terror.”

In January 2010, the Pentagon again issued a warning about recidivism, this time the day after President Obama announced a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis cleared for release from Guantánamo by his own interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force. The impetus for this unprincipled moratorium was the hysterical response to the news that the failed Christmas Day plane bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had been recruited in Yemen, and while it may have suited Obama to have the Pentagon release a new recidivism claim to bolster his moratorium (as it may have suited him in May 2009 to have a report released when he was laying down tough new policies that enraged progressive supporters), it also remains possible that the Pentagon was conducting its own game.

Certainly, the claims issued in January last year showed every sign of having been whipped up in a hurry. Instead of a report, the Pentagon briefed reporters that the recidivism rate was now 1 in 5 of the released prisoners, without providing any back-up information whatsoever, and then watched contentedly as one media outlet after another parroted their comments. Reuters uncritically ran an article entitled, “One in 5 ex-Guantánamo detainees joining militants,” (which it later changed to “US believes 1 in 5 ex-detainees joining militants”), and other media outlets soon joined in, including the New York Times (in an article that is no longer available online), in which the discredited claims of May 2009 were again repeated in the following line: “The rate of those returning to militancy was first reported early last year to be 11 percent. In April it was 14 percent.”

In early December, another “report” — actually a two-page statement issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, “consistent with direction in the Fiscal Year 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act” — claimed that the number of recidivists was now 1 in 4 of the prisoners released. As I explained at the time:

[O]f the 598 detainees released from Guantánamo, “The Intelligence Community assesses that 81 (13.5 percent) are confirmed and 69 (11.5 percent) are suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities after transfer.” The assessment also noted, “Of the 150 former GTMO detainees assessed as confirmed or suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities, the Intelligence Community assesses that 13 are dead, 54 are in custody, and 83 remain at large.” It was also noted that, of the “66 individuals transferred since January 2009″ — under President Obama, in other words — “2 are confirmed and 3 are suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities.”

As I also explained:

The assessment’s own claims were amplified in subsequent headlines, which failed to distinguish between “confirmed” and “suspected” terrrorists or insurgents. Fox News ran with “25 Percent Recidivism at Gitmo” … [and] although the [New York] Times‘ headline was the modest, “Some Ex-Detainees Still Tied to Terror,” the article itself stated that the report “offered the most detailed public accounting yet of what the government says has happened to former Guantánamo detainees, a matter that has been the subject of heated political debate.”

This, again, was nonsense, as there was no “detailed public accounting,” and it was not until last week, on the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, that Peter Bergen, Katherine Tiedemann and Andrew Lebovitch of the New America Foundation issued their own report challenging this latest propaganda, accompanied by an article in Foreign Policy, in which they concluded, based on a sober assessment of available public documentation, that:

[O]ur analysis of Pentagon reports, news stories, and other publicly available documents concerning the 600 or so released detainees suggests that when threats to the United States are considered, the true rate for those who have taken up arms or are suspected of doing so is more like 6 percent, or one in 17. This figure represents an increase of 2 percentage points from our previous analysis from July 2009, which indicated that barely 4 percent of those released from the prison in Cuba were confirmed or suspected of engaging in terrorist or insurgent activities against the United States or its interests.

This latest report by the New America Foundation was made available to reporters prior to its publication in Foreign Policy at a panel discussion, “Nine Years of Guantánamo: What Now?” that I had organized at the New America Foundation on the afternoon of January 11, and it prompted questions from the audience, and responses that were noted by Dan Froomkin of the Huffington Post. Froomkin explained that I was “concerned at how the recidivism figures were ‘conjured up out of nowhere’ but treated as fact by many mainstream media outlets,” and that I described it as “bad journalism,” and that is certainly the position I have always maintained.

He also picked up on comments made by Tom Wilner, the former attorney for the Kuwaiti prisoners at Guantánamo, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners during their habeas corpus claims in the Supreme Court in 2004 and 2008. Wilner directly addressed another problem with the recidivism claims — the US authorities’ failure to consider whether some of the relased men confirmed to have engaged in terrorist activity had not “returned” to a battlefield, but had actually been radicalized by their experience in US custody, and his conclusions were stark.

Speaking of Abdullah al-Ajmi, a former client of his who died as a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2008, two and a half years after his release, Wilner explained, “I was absolutely convinced that he did not do anything wrong, but I was concerned about his release, because he had become furious. He had turned, at Guantánamo, into this sort of madman.”

This chimes with comments made in June last year by Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, the director of the Saudi rehabilitation center responsible for re-educating prisoners released from Guantánamo, along with suspected or confirmed militants seized within the country and in other locations. Al-Hadlaq actually claimed that “about 20 per cent of the 120 repatriated former prisoners [from Guantánamo] have returned to radical activity” (whereas the New America Foundation mentioned only 15 confirmed or suspected Saudis in its report), but, crucially, in explaining why this rate was double that of the other men who passed through the program, he told reporters, “Those guys from other groups didn’t suffer torture,” unlike the men held at Guantánamo, adding, “Torturing is the most dangerous thing in radicalisation. You have more extremist people if you have more torture.”

As the gulf between the 1 in 4 recidivists claimed by the government clashes with the figure of 1 in 17 reported by the New America Foundation, it may be, as the authors of last week’s report conceded, that “there might be some additional former detainees who are suspected or confirmed of engaging in terrorism or insurgent activities who we could not identify in the publicly available sources.”

Those, however, cannot reasonably be expected to turn a figure of 48 “recidivists” into 150, and in addition, as I highlighted above, all of these assessments fail to consider whether the men in question are indeed recidivists, or whether it was their treatment at the hands of their US captors that prompted what Tom Wilner described, in Abdullah al-Ajmi’s case, as fury and madness.

While supporters of Guantánamo still follow Dick Cheney’s line, critics of the prison’s ongoing existence will be paying close attention to the circumstances of the men’s radicalization, and will not be at all surprised to discover that the United States cannot, in all honesty, claim that, in some instances, what happened to the men after their release from Guantánamo was not determined by what happened to them while they were held — and brutalized — in US custody.

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

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation, as “Pentagon Propaganda on Gitmo Prisoners Releases.”

On Saturday January 22, Amnesty International UK is holding its South East Regional Conference at The Vyne Centre, Broadway, Knaphill, Woking, GU21 2SP, from 10.30 am to 4.30 pm (map here). Entrance is free with a contribution requested towards lunch and refreshments, and the event opens for registration and coffee at 10 am.

I’ve been invited along as the keynote speaker, following my appearances at two Amnesty events in December at the Human Rights Action Centre in London — the Amnesty International Student Conference on November 13 (where, with Gareth Peirce, I spoke about Guantánamo and the need for action to secure the release of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (and the subject of an ongoing Amnesty International campaign in the UK and the US), and “The Rights Time,” a regional conference on December 4, where I delivered a presentation entitled, “Nine Years of Guantánamo: What Now?”

On Saturday, I’ll be stressing the need to continue campaigning for Shaker Aamer, whose continued detention is inexplicable, given that, in November, he was included in a financial settlement reached by the British government with 15 former Guantánamo prisoners, and his presence is needed in the UK to conclude this settlement, to enable the Metropolitan Police to conclude an investigation into his claims that British agents were present in the room when he was tortured in US custody in Afghanistan, and to enable Prime Minister David Cameron to proceed with his planned judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture abroad.

I will also be discussing the distressing inertia on the part of the Obama administration regarding the closure of Guantánamo, and the fair and just treatment of the 173 men still held, as discussed in my recent articles, Guantánamo Forever? and The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo, in which I explained how 89 men cleared for release are still being held indefinitely, 33 others recommended for trials are not being charged or tried, and 48 others are deliberately being held indefinitely without charge or trial, even though this is exactly what the Bush administration established in the first place, when it turned its back on domestic and international laws and treaties in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Also speaking will be Linda Ramsden from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, and there will also be workshops on Communities at Risk, Amnesty at 50 and Marvelous Meetings.

For further information, please email Lizann Peppard.

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

Last Tuesday, the Real News Network was one of a number of media organizations, independent journalists and activists filming the rally outside The White House and the protest outside the Department of Justice calling for the closure of Guantánamo on the 9th anniversary of the prison’s opening, and I’m delighted to note that a six-minute report on the events, featuring footage of myself, Tom Parker of Amnesty International USA and Frida Berrigan of Witness Against Torture speaking outside The White House, and Carmen Trotta of WAT speaking outside the DoJ, is now available online, and posted below.

Also included in the report is footage of the fine words used by President Obama, on his second day in office, when he announced that he was issuing an executive order promising to close Guantánamo within a year, which, of course, failed to materialize, and footage of Obama announcing, a year ago, a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis (following the failed Christmas Day plane bomb plot by a Nigerian apparently recruited in Yemen), which, as I mentioned in my talk outside The White House, remains one of the major stumbling blocks to the closure of the prison, leaving 58 men cleared for relase held indefinitely as political prisoners.

Real News also picked up on Tom Parker’s assertion that men accused of involvement in terrorism at Guantánamo should be tried in federal court, as happened last year with Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a former Guantánamo prisoner and CIA “ghost prisoner,” whose trial was a success, despite being spun as a failure by critics desperate to keep the Bush administration’s ill-conceibed “War on Terror” alive.

The Real News Network feature is below, via YouTube, and readers may also be interested in an analysis of Guantánamo delivered a year ago by Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is available here.

Note: The photo above is by Sarah Hogarth. Please see here for all her photos from the day’s events, and if you’re interested in the issues raised in this film, then please watch this video of a panel discussion on the future of Guantánamo that I organized at the New America Foundation on the afternoon of January 11, featuring myself, Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo, attorney Tom Wilner, who represented the Guantánamo prisoners in the Supreme Court, and Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution.

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

Last week, when I was in the US campaigning for the closure of Guantánamo on the 9th anniversary of the prison’s opening, my media appearances mainly involved TV — Democracy Now! in New York, and Press TV and two appearances on Russia Today in Washington D.C. I was also filmed on a number of occasions by independent journalists, and was very pleased that the panel discussion I organized at the New America Foundation on January 11, with Morris Davis, Tom Wilner and Ben Wittes, was filmed in its entirety.

During my visit, I was only interviewed on one radio show. On Thursday, just before heading to the airport to return to the UK, I was a guest of the veteran talk show host and political activist Peter Werbe, on his show which airs in the Detroit area. This was a fascinating 20-minute interview, but it does not yet appear to be available online. I’ll keep you posted.

On Friday, however, dogged with jetlag after snatchng just three hours sleep in the air, I did two shows, speaking first with the veteran “revolutionary journalist” Michael Slate on his weekly show, The Michael Slate Show, which is broadcast on KPFK in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, The 20-minute interview at the top of the show is available here, and is followed by an interview with Larry Everest, a friend and activist from the Berkeley area. Michael was a wonderfully supportive host, and we had the opportunity to run through the problems with Guantánamo that I highlighted in my recent article, The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo.

I then spoke with Rose Aguilar (who interviewed me back in October, as part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week) on her show “Your Call,” broadcast on KALW, San Francisco and KUSP, Santa Cruz and available here. I spoke to Rose in the last 20 minutes or so of the hour-long show that also featured California Watch’s Chase Davis, and Tax Notes’ David Cay Johnson discussing Gov. Brown’s proposed tax budget for California, and again had the opportunity to run through the current problems facing the remaining 173 prisoners, in a discussion that led Rose to suggest that we should revisit this topic in greater detail in the near future — which I’ll be happy to do, as Rose is an engaging and knowledgable host.

While I’m mentioning recent radio appearances, I’d also lke to mention a show from a few weeks ago, which slipped through my net over the New Year period. On December 23, I spoke to Linda Olson-Osterlund for her Year End Wrap-up show on KBOO FM in Portland, Oregon, and the 29-minute interview, on the program entitled “A Deeper Look,” is available here. I have spoken to Linda on several occasions over the last few years, and it was a pleasure, as ever, to talk to her. She described the show as follows:

2010 is coming to an end and the prisoners at the illegal prison in Guantánamo Bay have less reason to expect release than at any time since coming into the hands of the U.S. Military. Join host Linda Olson-Osterlund and her guest, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files, and co-director of the documentary “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.” Who is still there? Who has been released? The trial of Omar Khadr and what we can learn so far from documents released by WikiLeaks.

Note: The photo above is by Sarah Hogarth, and her album of photos from the January 11 events in Washington D.C. can be found here.

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

On the afternoon of January 11, after I had spoken at a rally outside The White House and at a protest outside the Department of Justice, the New America Foundation in Washington D.C. hosted a panel discussion, “Nine Years of Guantánamo: What Now?” which I had organized as part of a week-long US tour to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining 173 prisoners at Guantánamo on the 9th anniversary of the prison’s opening.

A packed house — featuring at least 150 journalists, lawyers, academics, activists, and government and military representatives — heard myself, Morris Davis (the former chief prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo), attorney Tom Wilner (who argued the Guantánamo cases in the Supreme Court) and Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution discuss and debate President Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo, what this means, and what can — and should — be done about it, following an introduction, describing the issues, by Patrick Doherty, the panel’s moderator, who heads the New America Foundation’s Smart Strategy Initiative, and is a senior advisor to the Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative.

A video of the panel discussion, including Patrick’s introduction, all four talks and a Q&A session, lasting one hour and 40 minutes in total, is available below, via YouTube, and I’m delighted that it was recorded, as it was a very lively session, raising some important questons, and introducing a note of urgency into mainstream discussions of the topic, which is largely lacking, despite the ongoing shame of President Obama’s failure to close this dark chapter in America’s recent history:

After Patrick’s introduction, I opened up the session, explaining who is still held, and why it is unacceptable that 89 men cleared for release are still held, that 33 men recommended for trials are not being put on trial, and why the administration’s plans to hold 48 of the remaining prisoners indefinitely without charge or trial is a terrible idea. This was the most detailed explanation I delivered during my US visit last week, covering all the themes covered in my articles, Guantánamo Forever? and The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo, and I was very pleased to have such a diverse and attentive audience.

Morris Davis, a former Air Force colonel, who is now the director of the D.C.-based Crimes of War Project, resigned as the chief prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo in October 2007, on the day that he was put in a chain of command under Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II, one of the small team of lawyers (including David Addington, John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales), who were close to former Vice President Dick Cheney, and who gave supposed legal cover for the Bush administration’s torture program. In his presentation, he enlightened us all with his analysis of the immediate precedent for Bush’s Military Commissions — involving Nazi saboteurs in World War II — and his reflections on his time at Guantánamo, and on the failure of the Commissions, which are favored by Republicans over the more appropriate venue of federal courts, for terrorist trials.

Following Morris Davis, Ben Wittes, an advocate of new legislation authorizing the indefinite detention of prisoners not only in relation to current circumstances, but also in the future, accepted his role as devil’s advocate for the panel, and his participation prompted a useful and relevant focus on the reasons who those of us who disagree with him retain our belief that a new system is not required: essentially, because the Bush administration’s “new paradigm” of a “War on Terror,” involving holding men indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” was — and remains — a shocking and unnecessary aberration from the existing methods for holding priosners — either as criminals (terrorists), to be tried in federal court, or as prisoners of war (soldiers), to be held according to the Geneva Conventions, which authorizes their detention untl the end of hostilties, and which, if followed by President Bush (or adopted by President Obama) would now mean that lawyers would be arguing how long a war can last.

In response, Tom Wilner, palpably dismayed at the failures and backsliding of the last two years, tackled some of the points raised by Ben Wittes, whom he has known for many years, and delivered a passionate call for anyone concerned about the ongoing existence of Guantánamo to overcome the inertia and apathy that has largely allowed Republican hysteria to go unchecked and unchallenged, and that has allowed President Obama to lose whatever courage he might once have possessed when it comes to removing this dreadful legacy of the Bush and Cheney years. “I am furious and ashamed,” Wilner said at one point (as related by Dan Froomkin in an article for the Huffington Post), adding, “I think Guantánamo is a symbol of fear and weakness.”

A lively Q&A session followed, and I do hope that you will watch the video if you have the time, and forward it, share it, recommend it and cross-post it if you like it. Gatherings like this are all too rare, and I’d like also to thank the New America Foundation for hosting it, and to express my hope that similar events can be arranged in the future, as, without passionate and engaged debate on these issues, it seems unlikely that Guantánamo will be closing in the foreseeable future, and, as a result, 173 men will continue to languish in a situation that — whatever its supposed rationale — ought to be a source of national and international shame. As I stated in my talk, “Every day that a place like Guantánamo is open is an insult to values that decent American people hold.”

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

On the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, after I had spoken at a rally outside The White House and a protest outside the Department of Justice, and before I attended a panel discussion I had put together for the New America Foundation, featuring myself, Morris Davis (the former chief prosecutor of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo), attorney Tom Wilner (who argued the Guantánamo cases before the Supreme Court) and Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution, I dropped by the studios of Russia Today (for the second day running) to talk about Guantánamo , and the reasons the prison hasn’t closed, as promised by President Obama, and managed, in seven and a half minutes, to run through some key elements of the story of the prison, and the reasons why, as I explained in a recent article, the remaining men can be described as The Political Prisoners of Guantánamo. While waiting for my interview, i was delighted to meet up with Morris Davis, who was also doing an interview prior to our panel discussion.

Both interviews are available below (via YouTube – here and here), and I’m pleased to note that Col. Davis, who is now the director of the Crimes of War Project, was encouraged to run through the story of how he resigned in October 2007, on the day that he heard he had been put in a chain of command under Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II. This was because of his own implacable opposition to the use of mateiral derived through the use of torture, and because Haynes, in contrast, had been one of the government lawyers closest to former Vice President Dick Cheney, and had played a major role in developing the Bush administration’s post-9/11 torture program.

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

On Tuesday January 11, on the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, when I was speaking at a rally outside The White House in Washington D.C., the London Guantánamo Campaign and Peace Strike delivered an open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron (reproduced at the end of this article), calling for the return of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, and then held a silent vigil in Trafalgar Square.

In the afternoon, Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen handed in a letter to the US embassy, issuing “a fresh call for action by the US authorities” in Shaker Aamer’s case. In a press release, Amnesty International noted that Aamer, who has a British wife and four British children, “has been detained at Guantánamo since February 2002 but has never been charged or brought to trial.” The press release also mentioned that, in November, “Amnesty stepped up its campaigning for Aamer and almost 6,000 Amnesty supporters wrote to their MPs asking them to press William Hague over the need for immediate action on his case.”

In the letter, addressed to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Kate Allen noted that there was “mounting concern in Britain at the failure of the US authorities to resolve the case after almost nine years.” She also called for “reassurance that the case will now be resolved quickly” and urged the US authorities “to agree a timetable for Aamer to be either allowed a fair trial or for him to be released and returned to his family in the UK.” The letter also pointed out that the Foreign Secretary William Hague and the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg have both recently raised Aamer’s plight directly with Ms. Clinton.

Kate Allen also issued the following statement:

Today we’ve reached the miserable milestone of nine years of Guantánamo Bay’s lawlessness. Ever since the shocking 11 September attacks Amnesty has said that where the authorities suspect someone of terrorism then they should be charged and given a fair hearing — instead we’ve had Guantánamo, a total travesty of justice. Enough is enough. It’s time for this travesty of justice to end. President Obama has got to deliver on his promise to close Guantánamo and all the detainees — including Shaker Aamer — have got to be either given proper trials or safely released.

As Amnesty International also noted, “The letter hand-in comes as Amnesty activists step up their campaign for Aamer, including with online lobbying of Hillary Clinton. In the US, Amnesty supporters are pressing President Obama, US Attorney General Eric Holder and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates about the case, and activists are staging a rally in Washington today to mark the anniversary” — at which Tom Parker, Amnesty International USA’s advocacy and policy director of terrorism, counterterrorism and human rights, spoke alongside myself, Pardiss Kebriaei, Center for Constitutional Rights staff attorney representing men detained at Guantánamo, Valerie Lucznikowska of September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Frida Berrigan of Witness Against Torture, and peace activist Kathy Kelly, who read out a statement by former prisoner Omar Deghayes.

Elsewhere, campaigners, including myself, kept up the pressure by other means, and the following is a letter submited to the Guardian, entitled, “Guantanamo Closure,” which is a version of the open letter to Prime Minister David Cameron, signed by dozens of journalists, activists and politicians:

Guantánamo Bay has now been open for torture and arbitrary detention for nine years. During that time, the former government secured the return to the UK of all British nationals held there, and all but two of the former British residents, but was complicit in their ordeal. Almost a year after the expiry of President Obama’s deadline to close Guantánamo, with 174 prisoners remaining there, there is still a long way to go.

We welcome recent efforts by William Hague and Nick Clegg to raise the case of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo, with Hillary Clinton; but this must translate into his immediate return to his family in the UK. We urge the government to assist in the closure of Guantánamo by following the example of other European countries that have accepted cleared prisoners who could not return to their country of origin due to fears for their safety.

Daniel Viesnik, London Guantánamo Campaign
Bisher Al-Rawi, former Guantánamo prisoner
Andy Worthington, journalist and author of The Guantánamo Files
Victoria Brittain, journalist and playwright
Joy Hurcombe, Brighton Against Guantánamo
Kate Hudson, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND)
Bruce Kent, Vice-president of Pax Christi
Jean Lambert, Green MEP
Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton Pavilion
Sarah Ludford, Liberal Democrat MEP
John McDonnell, Labour MP for Harlington and Hayes
Asim Qureshi, Executive director of Cageprisoners
Lindsey German, Convenor of Stop the War Coalition
Ray Silk, Save Shaker Aamer Campaign
Estella Schmid, Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC)
Walter Wolfgang, Labour CND
Noel Hamel, Chair, Kingston Peace Council
Liz Davies, Chair, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers
Maria Gallastegui, Peace Strike
Jonathan Bloch, Liberal Democrat Councillor, Haringey council
Desiree Howells, Peace and Justice in East London
Maryam Hassan, Justice for Aafia Coalition
Richard Haley, Chair, Scotland Against Criminalising Communities (SACC)
Darren Johnson, Green Party member of London Assembly
Aisha Maniar, London Guantánamo Campaign
Milan Rai, Co-editor of Peace News
Dr. Shahrar Ali, Green Party
Len Aldis, Secretary of Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society
Mark Barrett, Campaign for Real Democracy
Adrienne Burrows, Peace and Justice in East London
Chris Cole, Fig Tree
Hilary Evans, Kingston Peace Council/CND
Les Levidow, Campaign Against Criminalising Communities (CAMPACC)
Millius Palayiwa, Director, Fellowship of Reconciliation, England
Rosemary Addington
Khadijah Al-Hilali
Abduljaleel Bain
Steve Barnes
Manish Dhokia
Paschal Egan
David Ferrard
Aman Fida
Michael Fisher
Martin Francis
Anne Gray
C.C.H. Gwyntopher
David Harrold
Mary Holmes
Gillian Hurle
Miranda James
Ewa Jasiewicz
Zelda Jeffers
N.M. Kleinman
Ann Kobayashi
Sarah Lasenby
Christine MacLeod
Jim McCluskey
Simon Moore
Corinna Mullin
Anita Olivacce
Roshan Pedder
Mike Phipps
Malcolm Pittock
Ian Pocock
David Polden
M.A. Qavi
Emma Sangster
Sam Walton
Frances Webber
Adrian White
Adrian Windisch
Richard Wolff

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