7.4.16
In the long quest for accountability for those who ordered and implemented the crimes committed by the United States since 9/11 in its brutal and counter-productive “war on terror,” victory has so far proven elusive, and no one has had to answer for the torture, the extraordinary rendition, the CIA “black sites,” the proxy torture prisons elsewhere, the shameful disregard of the Geneva Conventions and the embrace of indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that has been such a shame and disgrace for anyone not blinded by the violence and vengeance that have consumed so much of the US’s actions and attitudes in the last 14 and a half years.
In the US itself, President Obama made it clear from the beginning that he was looking forwards and not backwards when it came to accountability, as though sweeping the crimes mentioned above under the carpet would remove their poison from infecting US society as a whole. An early example of refusing to allow any victims of extraordinary rendition and torture anywhere near a courtroom was the Obama administration, in 2009 (and into 2010), invoking the “state secrets doctrine” (a blanket denial of any effort to challenge the government’s actions) to prevent the British resident and torture victim Binyam Mohamed and others from challenging the Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen for its role as the CIA’s travel agent for torture.
In February 2010, President Obama also allowed a Justice Department fixer to override the conclusions of an ethics investigation into John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who wrote and approved the 2002 “torture memos” that cynically purported to redefine torture so it could legally be used by the CIA. The investigation had concluded that they were guilty of “wrongful conduct,” but they received only a slapped wrist after Deputy Attorney General David Margolis concluded instead that they had merely exercised “poor judgment.”
And in December 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee published the damning executive summary of its exhaustive, four-year report into the CIA’s torture program, but calls for accountability have not been followed up by any branch of the US government. In September 2015, Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) “filed a complaint with the US Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General requesting an immediate review of the conduct of Justice Department officials in response to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, including possibly misleading statements about evidence of torture,” and in October 2015 the ACLU filed a lawsuit against James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the two psychologists who designed, implemented and oversaw the CIA’s torture program. The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, is on behalf of three of the program’s victims, one of whom died.
Readers can also join the ACLU in asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special prosecutor to hold Mitchell and Jessen accountable for their actions, and join Amnesty international in asking the Attorney General to read the Senate torture report and to act on it. As AIUSA states, “the Justice Department has failed to commit to reading and reviewing the full report. In litigation the Justice Department has even said that its copies of the full report remain unread, in a sealed envelope.”
Despite these failures, efforts to secure accountability have also been made outside the US, although it has been difficult for the countries involved because the US has refused to cooperate with investigations at any level. When WikiLeaks released a trove of US diplomatic cables in 2010, it became apparent that the Bush administration had put pressure on Germany not to conduct an investigation into the rendition and torture of Khaled El-Masri, a notorious case of mistaken identity, and the Obama administration had done the same with the Spanish government in 2009, an investigation into six former Bush administration lawyers — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, William Haynes, the Pentagon’s former general counsel, Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy, Jay Bybee, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel — for “creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture.”
Nevertheless, there has been some success. In Italy, CIA officials were successfully prosecuted, in absentia, for their role in the kidnapping and rendition of Abu Omar, a cleric, in Milan in 2003, and the European Court of Human Rights has found Macedonia guilty in the rendition of Khaled El-Masri, also granting him a small amount of compensation (60,000 Euros). In Poland, where the CIA ran a “black site” for torture in 2002-03, and where an official prosecutor-led investigation has been ongoing for many years, the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Polish government, in 2015, to pay $262,000 compensation to the “high-value detainees” Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, both of whom have been held at Guantánamo since September 2006.
Cases are still ongoing in Spain, in Germany, in Lithuania (another European “black site,” along with Romania, where blanket denial has been the government’s response), and in Africa lawyers are seeking to get the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to re-examine the case of rendition and torture victim Mohammed al-Asad, having turned it down in 2014, before the Senate torture report was released, in which he is named.
There have also been victories involving the suppression of the free movement of senior US officials, most notably in the case of former President George W. Bush, who cancelled a visit to Switzerland in February 2011 after lawyers prepared a torture complaint against him, although it is reasonable to assume that this is not the only time that senior officials and others involved with the Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies have decided not to travel abroad.
A month ago, one of these officials, former Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantánamo between 2002 and 2004, when the worst of the torture took place at the prison, presumably added France to his own personal list of countries not to visit when, as Deutsche Welle put it, he “was a no-show in a French court,” where he had been summoned to answer questions stemming from accusations that he oversaw the torture of three French nationals at Guantánamo.”
The three men in question are Mourad Benchellali and Nizar Sassi (released in July 2004) and Khaled Ben Mustapha (released in March 2005), and, on its website, the Center for Constitutional Rights explains the long history of the complaint against Miller as follows:
There is an ongoing investigation in France into the torture and other serious mistreatment of three French citizens who were detained at Guantánamo. The jurisdiction of the instructing judge was confirmed by the appeals court in June 2005. In January 2012, the former investigating magistrate, Sophie Clement, issued a formal request, or “letter rogatory”, to the United States. According to news reports, the French investigative judge requested access to the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, to relevant documents as well as to all persons who had contact with the three victims during their detention there. The United States still has not replied. On February 26, 2014, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights submitted an expert report urging the French investigating magistrate to issue a subpoena for former Guantánamo commander Geoffrey Miller. The magistrate denied the request. On March 5, 2015, the court of appeals in Paris (Chambre de l’instruction de la Cour d’appel de Paris) heard an appeal by the plaintiffs requesting a reversal of the decision not to subpoena Miller. CCR and ECCHR submitted materials to assist the court of appeals in understanding Miller’s role in the chain of command and key developments regarding interrogation practices at Guantánamo. On April 2, 2015, the appeals court ordered the lower court to summon Miller to explain his role in the abuse. On January 20, 2016, the court summoned Miller to appear before the court on March 1, 2016.
Following Miller’s failure to turn up, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights issued the following statement:
Miller’s absence speaks volumes about the Obama administration’s continued unwillingness to confront America’s torture legacy. The administration not only refuses to investigate US officials like Miller for torture, it apparently remains unwilling to cooperate with international torture investigations like the one in France. Geoffrey Miller has much to answer for regarding the treatment of detainees during his tenure. The Convention Against Torture obligates both France and the US to prevent and punish torture, including through the exercise of universal jurisdiction, but only one country is upholding its obligations in this case. The Obama administration’s continued embrace of impunity sends a clear message that it will pick and choose which international obligations to honor. The court should recognize the necessity of its investigation in light of the US government’s failure to pursue accountability for the torture of men at Guantánamo.
While lawyers work out whether they can seek an arrest warrant for Maj. Gen. Miller, I’m posting below the full complaint against him from February 2014, as a reminder of some of the horrors of Guantánamo’s long and disgraceful history, in which he played a major part, and also as a reminder of other disgraceful developments, bearing in mind Miller’s transfer to Iraq, after Guantánamo, where he oversaw some of the developments that led to the Abu Ghraib scandal. See the original document for the footnotes.
JOINT EXPERT OPINION by: Katherine Gallagher, Senior Staff Attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), New York, and Vice President, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Paris, and Wolfgang Kaleck, General Secretary, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), Berlin
Introduction
The Center for Constitutional Rights (“CCR”) and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (“ECCHR”) present this dossier containing key information regarding the criminal role played by GEOFFREY MILLER, a retired U.S. Major General in the United States army, who served as Commander of Joint Task Force Guantánamo and Deputy Commanding General of Detention Operations in Iraq, in the torture and other serious abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody in Guantánamo and Iraq. With this dossier, we seek to assist the investigations by the honorable Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris (file no. 2275/05/10). […]
CCR and ECCHR organizations have long-standing expertise on the factual and legal questions at issue in this case. On 10 January 2013, both organizations were accepted as a party (acusación particular) in an on-going investigation by the Spanish Audiencia Nacional into “an authorized and systematic plan of torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of any detainee,” perpetrated by U.S. government officials against persons detained in Guantánamo and other locations (file no. 150/09-P). CCR and ECCHR have submitted numerous legal and factual expert opinions in a second criminal proceeding in Spain brought against six former U.S. officials. CCR and ECCHR have also sought accountability for the criminal violations committed by U.S. officials against specific individuals through its initiation of proceedings, including in Canada, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. Additionally, since 2002, CCR has represented plaintiffs who have been subjected to every facet of the United States‟ torture program, from Guantánamo detainees, to Abu Ghraib torture survivors, and victims of extraordinary rendition and CIA ghost detention. CCR has represented former detainees in U.S. federal courts in habeas corpus proceedings and civil actions, seeking habeas relief, injunctions or damages. Furthermore, ECCHR has represented a victim of extraordinary rendition and CIA secret detention before German courts.
Role and Functions of Geoffrey Miller: 2002-2006
i. Overview of Miller’s Roles and Responsibilities
On 8 November 2002, MG Geoffrey Miller took command of JTF-GTMO. As commander of JTF-GTMO, MG Miller‟s mission at Guantánamo was “to integrate both the detention and intelligence function to produce actionable intelligence for the nation … operational and strategic intelligence to help the [United States] win the global war on terror.” MG Miller unified the command over military intelligence units and military police units, and had them work together to “soften up” detainees for interrogation. Miller implemented newly established interrogation techniques that violated the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Notably, when Miller took command of JTF-GTMO, he had no first-hand experience with detainees or interrogations. Miller reported to Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, and was in regular contact with Rumsfeld during his time at Guantánamo.
While in the position of commander of JTF-GTMO, MG Miller travelled to Iraq, and specifically to Abu Ghraib prison, in August–September 2003. MG Miller was sent to Iraq to bring Secretary Rumsfeld’s 16 April 2003 policy guidelines for Guantánamo to the Combined Joint Task Force 7 (CJTF-7) in Iraq as a possible model for the command-wide Iraq policy; Miller recommended that such a model be adopted. In September 2003, General Ricardo Sanchez, Commander of Coalition Ground Forces in Iraq, authorized the use of techniques that largely reflected Miller‟s recommendations and the 16 April 2003 memorandum.
MG Miller became Deputy Commanding General of Detention Operations in Iraq in April 2004. This newly-established position created a unity of command in Iraq for all detention and interrogation operations.25 Among the detention facilities under Miller‟s command was the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
ii. Role of Miller in Torture and other Serious Violations of International Law at Guantánamo
MG Miller became commander of the newly formed JTF-GTMO, a unit that combined the detention and security operations (JTF-160) and interrogators and intelligence gathering function (JRF-170), in November 2002. JTF-GTMO ran the U.S. detention facilities, including Camp X-Ray, Camp Delta and Camp Echo. Immediately prior to his arrival at Guantánamo, new interrogation techniques were drawn up that did not conform to the Geneva Conventions and went beyond those approved in the U.S. Army Field Manual; MG Miller supported and implemented these techniques. On 2 December 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld formally approved these additional interrogation techniques, which included hooding, stress positions, removal of clothing, forced grooming, exploitation of individual and cultural phobias (e.g. dogs), isolation for up to 30 days, and removal of all comfort items, including religious items. MG Miller implemented techniques designed to “soften up” detainees, including sleep deprivation, extended isolation, forcing detainees to stand or crouch in “stress positions,” stripping detainees and exposure to extremes of heat and cold.
Secretary Rumsfeld rescinded permission for the more controversial techniques on 15 January 2003, although under MG Miller’s command at Guantánamo, these techniques continued to be used in certain cases.
When MG Miller was solicited for his input on interrogation techniques in January 2003, he stated: “The command must have the ability to conduct interrogations using a wide variety of techniques,” listing the following techniques as “essential”: use of an isolation facility; interrogating detainee in an environment other than a standard interrogation room; varying levels of deprivation of light and auditory stimuli to include the use of a white room for up to three days; the use of up to 20-hour interrogations; the use of a hood during transportation and movement; removal of all comfort items, including religious items; serving of “meals ready to eat” instead of hot rations; forced grooming, including shaving of facial hair and head; and use of false documents and reports. In February 2003, Miller again pressed to be able to isolate detainees and interrogate them up to 20 hours, calling this the “hallmark” interrogation technique. Miller later also requested that sound modulation be authorized for interrogations at Guantánamo.
Around the same time as Secretary Rumsfeld issued new interrogation guidelines, which authorized 24 techniques including dietary manipulation, environmental manipulation, sleep adjustment and “false flag,” reports surfaced of detainee mistreatment at Guantánamo. MG Miller‟s response to the allegations of mistreatment of detainees was subsequently criticized in the Senate Armed Services Committee as inadequate. Serious mistreatment of detainees continued. Even after MG Miller purportedly ordered that “fear up harsh” not be used, he sought approval for an interrogation plan in July 2003 that included previously banned interrogation techniques; that plan was subsequently authorized by Rumsfeld.
The serious violations of international law, including violations of the Torture Convention and Geneva Conventions, are well documented. Released detainees describe the serious abuse to which they were subjected during the time that MG Miller was commander of Guantánamo: being short shackled in painful “stress positions” for many hours at a time, causing deep flesh wounds and permanent scarring; threats with unmuzzled dogs; forced stripping; being photographed naked; being subjected to repeated forced body cavity searches; being exposed to extremes of heat and cold for the purpose of causing suffering; being kept in filthy cages for 24 hours per day with no exercise or sanitation; denial of access to necessary medical care; deprivation of adequate food, sleep, communication with family and friends, and of information about their status; and violent beatings by the “Extreme Reaction Force”. It is recalled that twelve years since the opening of Guantánamo, none of the detainees – the vast majority of whom have never been charged with any crime and will not be charged with any crime, despite continued detention – have been permitted to have any visits with their families and have had very limited contact with the outside world. These acts constitute torture, and violate, at a minimum, the Geneva Conventions prohibition on coercive interrogations.
In October 2003, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) conducted more than 500 interviews at Guantánamo before meeting with MG Miller and his top aides. The ICRC voiced its concern regarding the lack of a legal system for the detainees, the continued use of steel cages, the “excessive use of isolation‟ and the lack of repatriation for the detainees. The ICRC concluded that the interrogators had “too much control over the basic needs of detainees … the interrogators have total control over the level of isolation in which detainees were kept; the level of comfort items detainees can receive; and the access to basic needs of the detainees.” MG Miller objected at the comment and told the ICRC that interrogation techniques were none of their concern. The ICRC told MG Miller that those methods and the lengths of interrogations were coercive and having a “cumulative effect” on the mental health of the detainees and that the steel cages, coupled with the maximum security nature of the facility and the isolation techniques, constituted harsh treatment. Following that visit, the ICRC expressed rare public criticism of the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo under MG Miller‟s authority, stating that “the US authorities have placed the internees in Guantanamo beyond the law. This means that, after more than eighteen months of captivity, the internees still have no idea about their fate, and no means of recourse through any legal mechanism.” The ICRC continued, stating that there is “worrying deterioration in the psychological health of a large number.” Ten years ago, the ICRC expressed concern with the “seemingly open-ended system of internment,” that existed under MG Miller‟s watch; with only minor modifications, that system continues to operate.
iii. Role of Miller in Torture of Mohammed al Qahtani
Mohammed al Qahtani, a detainee from Saudi Arabia, was transferred to Guantánamo in early 2002. He was subjected to a prolonged, aggressive interrogation that violated international law, known as the “First Special Interrogation Plan.” The interrogation plan was authorized by then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld shortly after MG Miller took over command of JTF-GTMO. Despite objections to the plan by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the Department of Defense (DoD) Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF), and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Miller authorized use of the interrogation plan and played a key role in its execution. Indeed, Miller allowed the interrogation to proceed while the CITF refused to allow any of its agents to be involved in any way with it. This interrogation plan included 48 days of severe sleep deprivation and 20-hour interrogations, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, dehumanizing treatment, the use of physical force against him, prolonged stress positions, prolonged sensory overstimulation, and threats with military dogs.
MG Miller played a direct role in the torture of Mr. al Qahtani when he authorized the sleep deprivation program under which Mr. al Qahtani was kept awake for twenty hours, and authorized and supervised the state of severe isolation and sensory deprivation to which Mr. al Qahtani was subjected, among other acts. The Schmidt Report recommended that Miller be held accountable and admonished for his role – as both a direct participant and for failing to prevent his subordinates from abusing – in the interrogation of Mr. Al Qahtani.
Mohammed al Qahtani was interrogated from 23 November 2002 through 16 January 2003. The techniques were directly inspired by the “Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE)” techniques, which are techniques taught to U.S. military members on how to resist hostile interrogations. These techniques were later widely acknowledged as torture. Indeed, the former convening office of the military commissions at Guantánamo declared that she could not bring charges against Mr. al Qahtani due to the torture inflicted on him: “we tortured al-Qahtani. … His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case for prosecution.”
Rather than receiving treatment and support for the torture he was subjected to, Mr. al Qahtani remains detained at Guantánamo without charge.
iv. Role of Miller in Torture and other Serious Violations of International Law in Iraq and at Abu Ghraib
MG Miller’s responsibility for violations in Iraq relates not only to the time-period during which he was Deputy Commanding General of Detention Operations, but also relates to the period during which the most notorious acts of torture in Iraq occurred. MG Miller was sent to Iraq in August 2003 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assess intelligence operations and, he has said, conduct “strategic interrogation and intelligence development and detention operations in theatre.” It was shortly after this visit by MG Miller that the most serious abuses and torture at Abu Ghraib occurred.
MG Miller was explicitly authorized to conform interrogation methods in Iraq to those at Guantánamo. Miller wanted to “Gitmo-ize” Iraq and Abu Ghraib. During his visit to Iraq, Miller and his team discussed the 16 April 2003 tactical guidelines for Guantánamo with those involved in interrogations in Iraq, and – despite the clear instruction that these interrogation techniques were limited to “unlawful combatants held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” – recommended that it serve as a model for Iraqi-wide policy. These guidelines were subsequently adopted for use at Abu Ghraib. It is important to recall that the systems in place in Guantánamo and Iraq were intended to be treated differently under the Bush administration: the Geneva Conventions were declared inapplicable at Guantánamo – a decision later overturned by the United States Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld – but were always applicable to Iraq. Thus, by recommending interrogation policies from Guantánamo be applied in Iraq, Miller was advising that policies that fell outside the scope of the Geneva Conventions could be applied to a country, a conflict and civilian detainees protected by the Geneva Conventions.
When MG Miller toured the detention facility used by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), he remarked that they were “running a country club” and indicated he thought that the treatment of detainees was too lenient. One member of the U.S. military who accompanied Miller on this tour reported that “Miller recommended the ISG shackle detainees and make them walk on gravel rather than on concrete pathways to show the detainees who was in control.” Brigadier General Janis Karpinski stated that MG Miller said, during a briefing on interrogations: “Look, you have to treat them like dogs. If they ever felt like anything more than dogs, you have effectively lost control of the interrogation.” An MG in Iraq reported that MG Miller told him that he was “not getting the maximum” out of his detainees because they “’haven’t broken [the detainees]’ psychologically” and that Miller said he would “get back to [him] with some ideas of how you can perhaps deal with these people where you can actually break them, some techniques you can use.”
Col. Thomas Pappas, then-commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade at Abu Ghraib, stated that MG Miller told him that at Guantánamo they used military working dogs and that dogs were effective in setting the atmosphere for interrogations. According to MG Miller, his team recommended a strategy to work the operational schedule of the dog teams so the dogs were present when the detainees were awake, not when they are sleeping. Pappas said that the “tenor of the discussions was that we had to get tougher with the detainees.” As is now known, dog teams arrived at Abu Ghraib in the wake of MG Miller‟s visit to Iraq, and these military dogs were used to abuse detainees, including during interrogations.
MG Miller also recommended that the detention and interrogation operations being integrated under one command authority in Iraq, as had been done at Guantánamo.
Following MG Miller’s trip to Iraq, Lieutenant General (LTG) Sanchez adopted a policy that drew heavily from Rumsfeld’s 16 April 2003 memorandum, and included such techniques as the presence of working dogs, stress positions, sleep management, loud music and light control. The policies were applicable to all detainees, including civilian detainees. Following a legal review, however, a number of the policies LTG Sanchez approved on 14 September 2003 were deemed to be in contravention of the Geneva Conventions, including Article 17 of the Third Geneva Conventions which prohibits coercive interrogations. LTG Sanchez’s policy was later rescinded and replaced with a new policy on 12 October 2003. The 12 October 2003 policy allowed for an additional nine techniques, namely those omitted because of concern that they violated the Geneva Conventions, upon request and approval. These prohibited techniques also resurfaced in the policy for interrogations at the SMU TF.
Shortly after MG Miller’s visit to Iraq, detainees were subjected to “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses.” The migration of interrogation policies and practices from Guantánamo to Iraq was cited as a specific factor in the torture of detainees in Iraq. For example, forced nakedness never showed up on any of the interrogation policies authorized in Iraq but were seen as “imported” techniques that “could be traced through Afghanistan and GTMO.”
The Taguba Report criticized many of MG Miller’s recommendations and his use of Guantánamo operational procedures and interrogation authorities as baselines for his observations and recommendations in Iraq. Miller’s impact is apparent when assessing the impact of creating a unified police and interrogation unit: the torture of detainees involved both the military police and interrogators (as well as private military contractors), with interrogators encouraging military police to isolate, strip and otherwise abuse or humiliate detainees prior to interrogation sessions. Taguba noted the recommendations of MG Miller’s team that “the ‘guard force’ be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees appears to be in conflict with … Army Regulation (AR 190-8) that military police do not participate in military intelligence supervised interrogation sessions,” and concluded, “Military Police should not be involved with setting favorable conditions for subsequent interviews. These actions … clearly run counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility.”
MG Miller returned to Iraq to take up his position overseeing detention and interrogation in April 2004 – the same month that the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib became public. Although Miller knew that there were serious concerns about the treatment of detainees there, having been advised of such concerns at least with regards to the Special Mission Unit Task Force during his August-September 2003 visit, and then the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, allegations of torture and abuse at detention centers across Iraq persisted throughout Miller’s time there.
Conclusion
The information above demonstrates that Geoffrey Miller bears individual criminal responsibility for the war crimes and acts of torture inflicted on detainees in U.S. custody at Guantánamo and in Iraq. Based on his position as a commander, Miller is responsible for the acts he authorized, commanded or directed his subordinates to commit, as well as for the acts of his subordinates which he failed to prevent or punish. Based on his leadership position and involvement in developing, authorizing and implementing interrogation policies, Miller can also be held responsible as a member of a joint criminal enterprise for his involvement in the torture of detainees in U.S. custody, or, alternatively, for aiding and abetting torture and other war crimes.
Based on the foregoing there is a sufficient connection between GEOFFREY MILLER and the pending torture investigation to warrant issuing a SUBPOENA TO HEAR THE TESTIMONY OF GEOFFREY MILLER as it relates to the allegations under investigation and “an authorized and systematic plan of torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of any detainee.”
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — 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 six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and 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, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
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Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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9 Responses
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
Here’s my latest article, looking at the case against the former commander of Guantanamo, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who failed to turn up in a French court last month to answer questions about his role in the torture at Guantanamo of three French citizens. Miller was the commander from 2002-04, when torture was widespread, and later implemented torture in Iraq, coinciding with the Abu Ghraib scandal. Included is the whole of the text of the legal complaint against Miller.
...on April 7th, 2016 at 4:57 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Riene Sullivan wrote:
you are so good Andy Worthington, you never give up or lose hope and it gives others hope for justice.
...on April 7th, 2016 at 9:48 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks, Riene, for the kind and supportive words!
...on April 7th, 2016 at 9:49 pm
Martin says...
Yeah, I read about the guy in The Black Banners. He’s a real SOB. He wouldn’t even cooperate with FBI agent Ali Soufan in allowing Abdul Wahab Rahabi to call his family in exchange for Rahabi’s cooperation and as mentioned above, allowed the torture of Qahtani.
http://www.rulit.me/books/the-black-banners-read-249656-118.html
...on April 8th, 2016 at 8:35 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks, Martin. Interesting site that I hadn’t seen before featuring Soufan’s book. The hardback has been available in the bargain shops here for a few years for about £4.
I first found Miller exposed as an inadequate leader in David Rose’s book about Guantanamo: http://www.amazon.com/Guantanamo-The-War-Human-Rights/dp/159558093X
And of course I wrote about him in my book too.
...on April 10th, 2016 at 12:29 am
Andy Worthington says...
Rose Ann Bellotti wrote:
That name is burned into my brain. The man who “Gitmo-ized” Abu Ghraib. Naturally he didn’t show up to answer questions in a French court. Justice delayed IS justice denied.
...on April 10th, 2016 at 11:15 am
Andy Worthington says...
Good to hear from you, Rose Ann. Well said!
...on April 10th, 2016 at 11:17 am
Andy Worthington says...
Mark Parker wrote:
A documentary on this would be good, these things should be in the open, not be swept under the rug by complicit politicians, prosecuters should go after those responsible with vigor.
Obama should have insisted on prosecutions, the crimes are known. It is a measure of moral character or lack of moral character for a man in a position of trust and responsability, to shirk that duty, and allow known criminals to escape prosecution and toprotect them from it.
...on April 15th, 2016 at 12:54 am
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, well said, Mark. There should indeed be a documentary, but no mainstream network would ever be interested in airing a program calling for senior US officials – up to an including the president – to be prosecuted.
...on April 15th, 2016 at 12:54 am