My Reflections on Guantánamo and the 21st Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks and a Video of My Interview on Salaamedia in South Africa

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Today marks the 21st anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people lost their lives in coordinated terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

Sadly, it also marks the launch, in response, of a global ”war on terror” by the administration of George W. Bush that led to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, a 20-year endeavor that ended in humiliation last year when the US withdrew from Afghanistan, handing the country back to the Taliban; the illegal occupation of Iraq; the shredding of the Geneva Conventions in both countries; the establishment of a global, extrajudicial program of kidnapping, torture and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that, between 2002 and 2006, involved the CIA establishing and running numerous “black sites” (torture prisons) around the world; and the creation of a prison at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, where 779 men (and boys) have been held by the US military since it opened on January 11, 2002.

Since 2006, I have assiduously chronicled the monstrous injustices of Guantánamo, sought to expose and tell the stories of the prisoners held there — most of whom had nothing whatsoever to do with international terrorism — and campaigned for the prison’s closure, and two days ago, to mark the 21st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was delighted to be interviewed by Inayat Wadee, of Salaamedia in South Africa, about the anniversary, and about the shameful ongoing existence of Guantánamo, where 36 men are still held.

The video of our 14-minute interview, via YouTube, is below, and I hope that you have time to watch it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

After an introduction discussing the death of Queen Elizabeth II, we moved on to discuss the anniversary and also, of course, to discuss Guantánamo, where, as I explained, because of the US’s disgraceful claim that it could hold prisoners without ever putting them on trial or providing them with the protections of the Geneva Conventions, two-thirds of the 36 men still held — as well as the majority of the 733 prisoners released since the prison first opened — have never been charged with a crime.

I explained to Inayat that there is hope, finally, that the US is moving in the right direction on Guantánamo, as all but four of those 24 men who have never been charged with a crime have now been approved for release, with a majority of those decisions, taken by an administrative process called the Periodic Review Boards, established by President Obama, taking place since Biden took office.

Sadly, the Biden administration is moving much more slowly when it comes to finally freeing these men, either by sending them home, or, if that is impossible or impractical (in the cases of the Yemenis approved for release, for example), finding third countries prepared to offer them new homes, and it is, of course, imperative that those of us who care about Guantánamo, and the damage it has caused, to insist that these men are freed as swiftly as possible.

The ongoing failure to prosecute those allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks

Inayat and I didn’t have time to talk about the other men still held — those who have been charged, and in two cases convicted — but the bitter irony, on this anniversary, is that five of these men have been accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and yet are still held, in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings, because of the torture to which they were subjected in the CIA “black sites,” an ongoing demonstration of the Bush administration’s failure to recognize that, as well as producing fundamentally unreliable information, torture is also incompatible with the pursuit of justice.

The Associated Press recently reported on the failure to successfully prosecute the men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, quoting David Kelley, “a former US attorney in New York who co-chaired the Justice Department’s nationwide investigation into the attacks,” who “called the delays and failure to prosecute ‘an awful tragedy for the families of the victims,’” noting that the decision to try to prosecute the men in a military commission, rather than a US court, was “a tremendous failure” that was “as offensive to our Constitution as to our rule of law,” and was “a tremendous blemish on the country’s history.”

Sadly, however, in discussing the torture to which those allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men — were subjected, the AP slipped into the kinds of euphemistic descriptions of torture that have, throughout the whole sorry saga of the “war on terror,” blighted a true understanding of how horrendous the US’s response to 9/11 was. As the AP described it, “CIA operatives subjected them to enhanced interrogation techniques that were tantamount to torture, human rights groups say,” adding that “Mohammed was waterboarded — made to feel that he was drowning — 183 times.”

Just to confirm what actually happened, the techniques used were torture, not “tantamount to torture,” and it is not just human rights groups who assert that unarguable fact, and waterboarding is a form of drowning, which can lead to death, not an exercise in which those subjected to it are “made to feel that [they are] drowning.”

Perhaps there will eventually be something that resembles justice when it comes to these men. The AP article quoted James Connell, one of the attorneys for Ammar al-Baluchi, one of the five, who “confirmed reports both sides are still ‘attempting to reach a pretrial agreement’ that could … avoid a trial and result in lesser but still lengthy sentences.” This is as reassuring as any news regarding these men can be, because plea deals are the only viable way out of the mire of the torture-tainted military commissions.

On this anniversary, as I continue to await news of the next release from Guantánamo — of one or more of the 20 men approved for release by high-level US government review processes but still held — I’m also reflecting on how the US seems finally to have moved beyond the hysteria regarding terrorism that has dominated so much of the last 21 years, and that led, so disgracefully, to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq as some sort of “reckoning” for the crimes of 9/11.

In the years that followed 9/11, it was fairly standard behavior for anyone discussing it to reflect on where they were on that day, when the world changed forever. Now, however, you have to be over 25 years old to even remember 9/11, and millions of young people, in the US and around the world, either don’t even know what happened on September 11, 2001, or, at the very least, don’t have any comprehension of the trauma it involved.

As the men allegedly responsible for the crimes of that day still languish at Guantánamo, never successfully prosecuted because of the torture to which they were subjected, it is perhaps the bitterest irony of all that, as the US’s angry old warmongers continue to insist that everything they did — all the people they killed, tortured and abused — was to protect the American people, an increasing number of young Americans don’t even know what it is that they were supposedly being protected from, or even that they were supposedlty being protected from anything in the first place.

It is, beyond any doubt, time for every last vestige of this “war on terror” to be brought to an end.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison 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 you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.