Archive for June, 2022
Afghan Prisoner Asadullah Haroon Gul Freed From Guantánamo, Where 36 Men Now Remain, 20 Approved For Release
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Good news from Guantánamo, where the prison’s population has dropped to 36 with the release of the Afghan prisoner Asadullah Haroon Gul.
In a deal negotiated with the ruling Taliban government in Afghanistan, Gul was flown to Qatar, where he was welcomed by Taliban representatives who then arranged from him to be flown home to Afghanistan, to be reunited with his family, including his parents, his wife and his daughter, who he has not seen since she was a baby.
Gul’s release brings to an end a 15-year ordeal of imprisonment without charge or trial, which began when he arrived at Guantánamo in June 2007, at the age of 25 or 26, as one of the last detainees to arrive at the prison, having been seized in Afghanistan four months earlier.
38 Years Since the Last Stonehenge Free Festival, The Legacy of Those Who Destroyed It Is An Imminently Uninhabitable Planet
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Today, as revellers returned to Stonehenge, having been allowed to gather in the stones to watch the summer solstice sunrise for the first time in three years, because of Covid restrictions in 2020 and 2021, I find myself preoccupied with wondering what our ancestors, who built this sun temple on Salisbury Plain and so many other extraordinary monuments to the sun and the moon across the country, and throughout Europe and beyond, would make of the burning world we are currently inhabiting, in which extinction looms ever closer.
Our ancestors, of course, would have had no way of knowing that — thousands of years after they transported bluestones from Wales, and hauled vast sarsen stones from Avebury, 20 miles to the north, before shaping them over countless years and erecting them in horseshoes and circles aligned on the axis of the solar year (the summer solstice to the north east, and the winter solstice to the south west) — the sun they so evidently revered would be turned into a life-threatening monster by people whose self-regard, whose exploitation of nature and whose love of money would destroy the fragile atmosphere necessary for the life that — perhaps uniquely in the universe — teems everywhere on earth.
For all we know, our ancestors may also have ended up deranged by their own driving delusions, although it didn’t cause a mass extinction event. Certainly, something drove them to divert a startling amount of energy into building their temples and housing their dead — and their precious possessions. We can’t be sure of their motives, because they left no written records, but archaeologists have suggested that they were driven by fear; that Stonehenge, for example, was built not to mark the summer solstice, but the winter solstice, by people fearful that, after the steadily darkening months of autumn, the sun would not return, and spring would not bring its renewal of life, without all their effort.
As Majid Khan Asks a Court to Order His Release from Guantánamo, 100 Days Since Completing His Sentence, 20 Other Prisoners, Never Charged or Tried, Also Await Their Freedom
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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.
On paper, the prospects for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay are better now than they have been at any other time in its unforgivably long and bleak 20-year history.
Just 37 men are still held (less than five percent of the total number of prisoners held by the US military since the prison opened on January 11, 2002), and 21 of these men have been approved for release.
The problem, however, is that there is absolutely no sense of urgency within the Biden administration when it comes to freeing them.
20 of these men have been approved for release by high-level government review processes, and I’ll be discussing them in the second part of this article, but the most newsworthy aspect of this story right now concerns Majid Khan, the other man approved for release.
Five Years Since the Grenfell Tower Fire, No Justice for Survivors, and No Safety For Hundreds of Thousands of People Trapped in Unsafe Flats
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Today marks five years since the Grenfell Tower fire, a disaster that led to the deaths of 72 people, when an inferno engulfed the 24-storey tower block in North Kensington that was their home.
The disaster was foretold by those who lived in Grenfell Tower, who had found themselves ignored until it was too late by the organisation responsible for their safety — the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO), which had been given control, by Kensington and Chelsea Council, of all of its social housing.
In post after post on the website of the Grenfell Action Group, residents had repeatedly warned that the KCTMO was “an evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia who have no business to be charged with the responsibility of looking after the everyday management of large scale social housing estates.”
Quarterly Fundraiser: Can You Help Me Raise $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Work?
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Dear friends and supporters,
It’s over 16 years since I first began working full-time as an independent journalist and author writing about Guantánamo, telling the stories of the men (and boys) held there, and campaigning to get the prison closed, and it’s 13 years since I first began asking you, every three months, to enable me to continue this work by making a donation to support me as a reader-funded writer and activist.
Your support has been invaluable in enabling me, via this website, and the website of the Close Guantánamo campaign (which I established ten years ago with the US attorney Tom Wilner), to keep shining a light on the injustices of Guantánamo, especially in the face of frequent indifference from the mainstream media, and to present what I continue to hope are powerful perspectives on the prison and the men held that are based on my particular experience of researching and writing about the prisoners and the prison for the last 16 years.
This work began in 2006-07 with the research for my book The Guantánamo Files, and it constitutes a bedrock of knowledge about the prison and the men held there that I have built on ever since, and that I continue to write about as the main focus of my work because of my conviction that detailed knowledge of the truly monstrous lawlessness of Guantánamo requires those who come into close contact with it to remain focused on it, and not to drift with the tide of endlessly breaking news, or, indeed, to become seduced by the false notion that journalistic objectivity — presenting both sides of the story, and letting readers make up their own minds — should apply to somewhere as grotesque as Guantánamo.
The 16th Anniversary of the Implausible “Triple Suicide” at Guantánamo
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16 years ago, three men died at Guantánamo, and today I ask you to join me in what has become an annual act of remembrance for these men: Yasser al-Zahrani, Mani al-Utaybi and Ali al-Salami, who, according to the US authorities, committed suicide, more or less simultaneously, on the night of June 9, 2006, even though it appeared then — and still appears now — to have been almost impossible to commit suicide in a facility in which the prisoners were kept under almost permanent surveillance, and even if it were somehow plausible that the men in question could have hoarded enough sheets to tie their hands behind their backs, stuff rags down their own throats, and hang themselves.
I engage in this act of remembrance because these men have largely been forgotten, swallowed up by the black hole of secrecy that is Guantánamo, or, even worse, by its official narratives that seek to dismiss, however risibly, grave concerns about how, over the years, prisoners have been treated at Guantánamo, even when, as in the case of these three men, that has led to their deaths.
The three men were not significant prisoners in terms of any alleged involvement with Al-Qaeda. At most, they had been low-level foot soldiers helping the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance, in a long-running inter-Muslim civil war that suddenly changed after 9/11 and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, when they were rounded up, sent to Guantánamo as “terrorists,” and brutalized and held for years without charge or trial.
69 Senators and Representatives Urge Congress to Lift Restrictions on Transferring Guantánamo Prisoners to the US Mainland
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In the long and shameful 20-year history of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, obstacles to the prison’s closure — and to the conditions in which prisoners are held — have been raised persistently, since 2010, after President Obama lost control of Congress in the mid-term elections, by Republican lawmakers, in the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This year, as in previous years, concerned Democrats are hoping to overturn these provisions, and below I’m posting a letter they wrote recently to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, but before I get to that it’s worthwhile looking back at the long history of these Congressional obstacles.
In December 2010, when Congress passed the NDAA for 2011, it included, for the first time, three provisions regarding Guantánamo that represented an unacceptable intrusion on the president’s authority: firstly, a ban on the use of funds to bring any Guantánamo prisoners to the US mainland for any reasons, even to face trials; secondly, a ban on the use of funds to purchase or construct any facility on the US mainland for housing prisoners held, at the time, at Guantánamo; and, thirdly, a requirement that, before any prisoner is released, the defense secretary must sign off on the safety of doing so.
The first of these provisions was specifically aimed at derailing the Obama administration’s proposals to try Khalid Shiekh Mohammed (KSM) and the other men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks on the US mainland in federal court (and, just to make it clear, it mentioned KSM by name), while the second was designed to prevent the closure of Guantánamo by derailing the administration’s efforts to buy the empty Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois to transfer men from Guantánamo so that the prison could be closed. The third provision, meanwhile, was meant to make the release of prisoners unpalatable, as any post-release problems would become the responsibility of the defense secretary.
On the 37th Anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield, Gypsies and Travellers Face an Unprecedented Threat From This Vile and Bigoted Government
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37 years ago today, a event took place that has largely been shunted into the margins of modern British history, even though it remains a particularly chilling example of the state suppressing manifestations of dissent, and of ways of life that didn’t conform to a narrow interpretation of the ‘normal’ and the ‘acceptable’ in a manner reminiscent of the ways in which totalitarian authoritarian regimes deal with those regarded as an undesirable underclass.
That event is known as the Battle of the Beanfield, although ‘battle’ suggests the presence of two more or less equal parties engaged in conflict, when what actually took place was a one-sided rout of heartbreaking brutality, as 1,400 police, drawn from six counties and the MoD, violently assaulted and ‘decommissioned’ a convoy of vehicles, carrying 400 to 500 men, women and children, who were en route to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival.
For detailed accounts of the Beanfield and the wider free festival and travellers’ movements, my books The Battle of the Beanfield and Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion are both still in print, and can be ordered from me by clicking on the links.
The suppression of the festival — an alternative town that established itself every year in the fields opposite Stonehenge for the whole of June, and that, at its peak, in 1984, drew in tens of thousands of people from across the UK — was the justification used by the government of Margaret Thatcher to defend the single biggest peacetime assault on civilians in recent history, but it disguised other, even darker motives than the suppression of people’s collective assertion of a right to gather freely to listen to music and to practice alternative ways of living.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
