Archive for July, 2022
Joy as the Talented Artist Khaled Qassim is Approved for Release from Guantánamo, But When Will He Be Freed?
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20 years and two months since the Yemeni prisoner Khaled Qassim (aka Khalid Qasim) arrived at Guantánamo, where he has been held ever since without charge or trial, he has finally been approved for release. 25 years old at the time his capture, and frozen in time in the only known photo of him, taken at Guantánamo in the early years of his imprisonment, he is now 45 years old, and has, as a result, spent almost half his life at the prison.
The announcement that Khaled has been approved for release is wonderful news, as those of us who have been studying Guantánamo closely know that he is a talented artist (I posted an article about his art when it was shown in New York two years ago), and, in addition, we learned via his close friend, the released prisoner and author Mansoor Adayfi, that he is also a natural leader, a beautiful singer, a writer, a teacher and a talented football player.
Mansoor told us that Khaled’s natural leadership abilities meant that, in 2010, a Navy Commander said of him, “We like Khalid to represent all the detainees. He talks like a poet when he speaks on behalf of the detainees, and he’s an easy man to deal with,” although he was also, in the prison’s early years, a persistent hunger striker, one of around dozen young, mainly Yemeni prisoners who, as Adayfi explained in his powerful memoir, “Don’t Forget Us Here,” published last year, countered the US’s brutality and injustice with perpetual resistance, as did Adayfi himself.
Save Reginald House: Demolition Plans For Flats Next to Former Tidemill Garden Reveal the Broken State of Social Housing Provision in London
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In Deptford, in south east London, residents of 2-30a Reginald Road (also known as Reginald House), a block of council flats built in the 1960s by Lewisham Council, have lived with the threat of demolition hanging over them for the last 14 years.
Now, the council is trying to evict them all, in preparation for the block’s intended demolition in January 2023, but those living there — a mixture of long-term tenants, leaseholders and temporary tenants relocated there over the last five years — accuse the council of poor communication, intimidation and a failure to provide them with suitable new homes or alternative accommodation.
The block, consisting of 16 maisonettes, is structurally sound, but has been earmarked for demolition since 2008 as part of a ‘regeneration’ project, with the housing association Peabody, that also involves the old Tidemill primary school and its former grounds, including the much-loved, but now destroyed Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden, which was occupied for two months in 2018 to try to prevent its destruction, as well as the destruction of Reginald House. See the Facebook page of the Save Reginald Save Tidemill campaign for more information, as well as my archive of articles, and please also watch Hat Vickers’ recently released documentary film ’The Battle for Deptford’ if you haven’t seen it.
“The Endless Shame of Guantánamo Bay”: Close Guantánamo Co-Founders Tom Wilner and I Are Profiled in an Article in The New Republic
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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.
We’re honored that The New Republic magazine has profiled Tom Wilner and I, as the co-founders of the Close Guantanamo campaign, in their latest issue, in an article entitled, “The Endless Shame of Guantánamo Bay,” following interviews with Tom and I that were conducted in April by reporter Jordan Michael Smith.
When Smith first approached us, he stated that the intention of the article would be “focusing on people waging the lonely campaign to close Guantánamo, when so many Americans have forgotten about it,” and the finished article effectively weaves our recollections and reflections into a timeline of the prison’s unforgivably long history — 20 and a half years and counting.
Our Climate Crisis Paralysis: How, in the Face of Unprecedented Signs of Climate Collapse, We’re Still Being Failed by Politicians, the Media and Ourselves
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Last week, as the mercury started to rise in the UK, and sober weather-watchers warned that, for the first time ever, temperatures might reach 40°C in the UK, the default position of TV’s weathermen and women was to talk of records being broken, as though extreme heat was some kind of Olympic sporting event, and the plucky British weather was some sort of super-athlete, whose ‘achievement’ was to be celebrated.
Let’s be clear: there’s nothing to celebrate about temperatures reaching 40°C in the UK, as was recognised when Grahame Madge, a spokesman for the Met Office, said, “We’ve just issued a red warning for extreme heat for Monday and Tuesday which is the first such warning ever issued. The warning covers an area from London up to Manchester and then up to the Vale of York. This is potentially a very serious situation.”
While the news triggered widespread warnings about the impact of the heatwave on people’s health, almost none of the coverage focused on the underlying reasons for the heatwave, and it was only the severity of the forecast that, for a few days at least, stopped tabloid newspapers from running the ‘Scorchio’ headlines that they usually resort to when summer heat hits the UK. Perhaps they had finally recognised the severity of the situation via a comment by Penny Endersby, the chief executive of the Met Office, who said, “Here in the UK we’re used to treating a hot spell as a chance to go and play in the sun. This is not that sort of weather.”
Radio: I Discuss Guantánamo and WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files with Misty Winston on TNT Radio
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My thanks to the great activist radio host Misty Winston for having me on her “Cognitive Dissonance” show on TNT Radio recently, to discuss Guantánamo in general, and, in particular, the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011, over the course of an hour.
I’ve spoken with Misty before, and it was excellent to follow up with her about Guantánamo, which is so largely ignored these days by most media outlets. The show is available here, and I’ve also embedded it below.
Abd Al-Hadi Al-Iraqi is First “High-Value Detainee” To Accept Plea Deal at Guantánamo, Could Be Freed by 2024
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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.
Two weeks ago, a significant event took place at Guantánamo, when Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a 60- or 61-year old “high-value detainee,” whose real name is Nashwan al-Tamir, and who was one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, in April 2007, admitted to being involved in war crimes in a plea deal that could see him released from the prison by 2024.
It is the first plea deal reached with a “high-value detainee” under President Biden, and may indicate a way forward for the other nine “high-value detainee” trials, including those of the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of involvement in the attack, in 2000, on the USS Cole, in which 17 US Navy sailors were killed. The trials are stuck in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings, largely because of the seemingly unresolvable problem of providing fair trials to men who were tortured, and it is noteworthy that, in March, it was reported that plea deals were being discussed in connection with the 9/11 trial.
When al-Iraqi arrived at Guantánamo over 15 years ago, the Pentagon described him as “one of al-Qaeda’s most senior and most experienced operatives,” although details about how he ended up at Guantánamo were rather more shady. A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, explained that he had been transferred to DoD custody from the custody of the CIA, although he “would not say where or when al-Iraqi was captured or by whom,” while a US intelligence official, “speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter,” told the Associated Press that al-Iraqi had been captured in late 2006 “in an operation that involved many people in more than one country.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
