I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
Yesterday we marked a sad milestone — 250 days since the start of Donald Trump’s presidency. Across the spectrum of political life, the disaster that is Donald Trump continues to damage the US at home and to tarnish America’s reputation abroad, and, while there are too many problems to list, certain recent issues stand our for us —the persistence with which Trump continues to try to implement his outrageous Muslim ban, his racist targeting of black sportsmen for what he perceives as their lack of patriotism, and his warmongering against North Korea at the United Nations.
Islamophobia, racism and warmongering are always to be despised when they raise their ugly heads at the highest levels of government, and when it comes to our particular topic of concern — the prison at Guantánamo Bay — these signs from Trump do not bode well for our aim of seeing Guantánamo closed once and for all.
It is true that Trump has not yet managed to do anything stupendously negative regarding Guantánamo, despite threatening to do so. And so, for example, he has not officially rescinded President Obama’s executive order calling for the prison’s closure, and has not sent any new prisoners there, despite very evidently wanting to do so. Read the rest of this entry »
My band The Four Fathers have just released a brand-new online single, ‘Equal Rights And Justice For All,’ a passionate defence of habeas corpus, which is supposed to protect all of us from arbitrary imprisonment.
The song — an insistent and infectious roots reggae groove — was inspired by my work trying to get the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed down, my work opposing the use of secret evidence in the UK, and also by the 800th anniversary of King John signing Magna Carta in 2015. The key element of this document, which the barons obliged him to sign, was habeas corpus, the right to be bought before a judge to test the validity of one’s imprisonment, which, over the centuries that followed, ended up applying to everyone, and was successfully exported around the world as a hugely significant bulwark against tyranny.
See below for the song, on Bandcamp, where you can listen to it for free — or, if you’d like to support us, buy it as a download for just £1 ($1.25) — or more if you’d like. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in March, following up on an NPR feature, I profiled former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor al-Dayfi (aka Mansoor al-Zahari), a Yemeni citizen who was released from the prison in July 2016, but was not repatriated because the US refuses to send any Yemenis home, citing security concerns. Instead, like dozens of other men (including stateless Palestinians, and some other men in whose cases it was regarded as unsafe for them to be repatriated), he was sent to a third country after intense US negotiations.
In al-Dayfi’s case, he was sent to Serbia, where, it is clear, he has struggled to adapt, telling Arun Rath of NPR, “When they brought me to Serbia they make my life worse. They totally kill my dreams. It’s making my life worse. … Not because I like Guantánamo, but my life become worse here. I feel I am in another jail.”
He told Rath that, as I described it, “he wanted to be sent to an Arab country, and to protest his conditions he embarked on a hunger strike, just as he had at Guantánamo.”
It is impossible not to sympathise with al-Dayfi, an evidently bright man, and an insignificant prisoner of the “war on terror,” whose long imprisonment was a result of him being a victim of mistaken identity, and who, in Guantánamo, also developed a fascination for US culture, which, as I described it, involved him “becoming a fan of Taylor Swift, Shakira, Game of Thrones (although he felt there was too much bloodshed), US sitcoms, Christopher Nolan movies and Little House on the Prairie, which ‘remind[ed] him of his very rural home with few modern conveniences.’” Read the rest of this entry »
Great news from the District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, where three survivors of torture at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by employees of a private military contractor, CACI Premier Technology, have finally been told that their case can proceed, 14 years since they were initially held, and over nine years since the case was first filed.
It is now so long since the torture took place that younger readers may be unaware of Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq where photos of abuse first surfaced publicly in April 2004, shocking Americans in a way that nothing had previously despite there being such a wide array of brutal, counter-productive policies undertaken in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — from Afghanistan to Iraq, and from “black sites” and proxy torture prisons to Guantánamo. As they say — and this is a sad truth for a writer to acknowledge — a picture is worth a thousand words.
The three men are Suhail Najim Abdullah Al Shimari, Asa’ad Hamza Hanfoosh Zuba’e and Salah Hasan Nusaif Al-Ejaili, and their lawyers at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) stated in a press release after the ruling that the men, “formerly detained at the infamous ‘hard site’ at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were subjected to treatment that could constitute torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,” according to the judge who allowed the case to proceed, Judge Leonie Brinkema. Read the rest of this entry »
Happy belated birthday to former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Khadr, who turned 31 yesterday. Nearly three years since he was returned to Canada from Guantánamo, his birthday was an occasion to reflect on the mixed news from an Edmonton courtroom on Friday, in response to his request for his bail conditions to be eased.
Seized in Afghanistan at the age of 15 after a firefight that left him severely wounded, Khadr, who had been taken to Afghanistan by his father, was never rehabilitated, as the US is supposed to do with juvenile prisoners, according the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which both the US and Canada are signatories.
Instead, Khadr was subjected to torture and abuse, and, eventually, shamefully charged in a military commission trial on the basis that, in the firefight, he threw a grenade that killed a US soldier. Ignored by the US was his age at the time of the incident, and the very plausible claim that he never threw the grenade in the first place, having been face-down under a pile of rubble with horrendous injuries at the time the grenade was supposed to have been thrown. Read the rest of this entry »
On Saturday, I went to the New Cross Learning Centre — a community-run former library in New Cross — for a screening of ‘Dispossession: The Great Social Housing Swindle’, a new documentary about Britain’s housing crisis directed by Paul Sng, who is from New Cross (and is the director of ‘Sleaford Mods: Invisible Britain’). The screening was organised by the residents of the Achilles Street area, whose homes are threatened by Lewisham Council, which wants to knock them all down, and build shiny new replacements. The area affected runs between New Cross Road and Fordham Park (from south to north), and between Clifton Rise and Pagnell Street (from west to east), and there are 87 homes (with 33 leaseholders), and around 20 businesses (along New Cross Road and down Clifton Rise).
Lewisham Council claims, in its most recent consultation document, from February this year, that “[a]ll current council tenants who wish to stay in the new development will be able to do so with the same rent levels and tenancy conditions that they have today,” and that “[a]ny resident leaseholder who wishes to will be able to remain in home ownership on the new development.”
This sounds reassuring, but the recent history of regeneration projects — both in London and elsewhere in the country — is that councils and developers lie to tenants and leaseholders, to get them to agree to regeneration under terms that are not then honoured. Instead, tenants are evicted and their homes demolished, and they never get to return, and leaseholders are offered derisory amounts for the homes that, ironically, they bought under Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy, which is insufficient for them to buy a replacement property in the area, leading to their exodus in addition to that of the former tenants. Read the rest of this entry »
I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.
Eight months since Donald Trump became president, and 16 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, one unfortunate side-effect of 9/11 — the prison at Guantánamo Bay — briefly flickered back into the national consciousness last week.
That faraway facility, where 41 men are still held, was supposed to have been closed by President Obama, but that was a promise he failed to keep, despite having eight years to do. And now Donald Trump — childishly, petulantly, as usual — wants to treat the prison as his own plaything, somewhere to keep open forever, and to send new people to, whom he regards as his version of what Bush administration officials so memorably — and disproportionately — referred to as “the worst of the worst.”
“The worst of the worst” never were held at Guantánamo, as Larry Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell explained to me in an interview in 2009. He told me, “I laughed at this when I first heard it, but now I realize it was probably closer to the truth than anything the administration said — when Bush announced in September 2006, with some degree of trepidation, that he’d transferred these 14 to Guantánamo out of the secret prisons. Now I realize that they made that transfer principally so they could get some hardcore terrorists to Guantánamo.” Read the rest of this entry »
Three days ago, I published an article about former Guantánamo prisoner Djamel Ameziane, and specifically about a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), in Mexico City, at which, via his lawyers, and via a statement he had written, he asked the Commission members: “Please issue a merits decision and decide my case. I ask you to order reparations and other relief so that I can get the assistance that I need and move forward with my life, and put Guantánamo behind me forever. I also want an apology. I ask the representatives of the US: Will you say on behalf of your government that you are sorry for what the US Government did to me?”
The IACHR is a key part of the Organization of American States (OAS), whose mission is “to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere,” and whose resolutions are supposed to be binding on the US, which is a member state, although the US, of course, has little regard for anyone trying to tell it what to do.
As CCR described it, Ameziane also “urged OAS member states to remain involved in the issue given the current context in the US, and assist in the transfer of Guantánamo detainees and supporting efforts to close the detention center, among others.”
Below, I’m taking the opportunity to cross-post the whole of Djamel Ameziane’s statement, because it provides a powerful indictment of the manner in which the US, after 9/11, abandoned all adherence to the rule of law, setting up a global network of prisons — including at Guantánamo Bay, where Muslim men and boys, largely rounded up without any sense or any application of intelligence, were horribly abused and deprived of hope. Read the rest of this entry »
Dear friends, supporters, and any interested passers-by,
I need your help, and I won’t beat around the bush. I’m a reader-funded journalist, activist and creator, and I can’t continue to do what I do without your help. I’m trying to raise $2000 (£1600) to support my work for the next three months, and any amount — $15, $25, $50, $100 or more —will be very gratefully received. Click on the ‘Donate’ button above to make a donation, via Paypal.
So what do I do, and why do I need your money?
Well, since 2006, I’ve been researching and writing about the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay and working to get it closed down, because it’s a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and because outrageous lies have been told about the significance of the men held here (the “worst of the worst,” we were told, although most, as I have demonstrated repeatedly, were no such thing).
First — unpaid — I wrote a book, The Guantánamo Files, telling the stories of the prisoners, which took me 14 months, and then I began publishing articles here, on my website, on a daily basis, as I could find no one at the time prepared to pay me to write about everything I had learned through 14 months of research and writing. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, in Mexico City, a symbolically powerful blow was dealt to the United States’ notion of itself as a nation founded on the rule of law, which respects the rule of law and also respects human rights.
The occasion was a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a key part of the Organization of American States (OAS), whose mission is “to promote and protect human rights in the American hemisphere,” and whose resolutions are supposed to be binding on the US, which is a member state.
The hearing last Wednesday was for Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian citizen, and an ethnic Berber, who was held at Guantánamo for nearly 12 years.
In the hearing last week, at which Ameziane was represented by the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the lawyers representing him urged the IACHR to “hold the US accountable for the abuse” of Ameziane and the “discrimination” against him. CCR explained, in a press release, that it was “a landmark hearing,” and the following brief explanation of his story: Read the rest of this entry »
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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