Archive for December, 2022
If You Can, Please Support the Guantánamo Survivors Fund This Holiday Season
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.
In a just world, the US government would have done all in its power to ensure that prisoners held at Guantánamo for years without charge or trial, and then released, would have had opportunities to rebuild their lives with proper support and without harassment.
The truth, however, is that those released from Guantánamo remain unfairly tainted by having been held there, and cannot rely on any of the rights — freedom to travel, and freedom from arbitrary harassment and even imprisonment, for example — that all human beings are supposed to be able to take for granted.
In the cases of those prisoners who have been released to their home countries, the US’s role is necessarily limited, but in the cases of those resettled in third countries because it was regarded as unsafe for them to be repatriated, or because Congress passed laws preventing their repatriation, the US government is responsible for how these men have been treated, and continue to be treated after their release. Around 150 men are in this category of former prisoners, resettled in dozens of countries around the world.
Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Guantánamo Work into 2023
Please click on the ‘Donate’ button below to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work on Guantánamo over the next three months.
Dear friends and supporters,
Every three months I ask you, if you can, to support my work as an independent journalist and activist, primarily as the chronicler of the prison at Guantánamo Bay over the last 16 — now nearly 17 — years, telling the stories of the men held and campaigning to get the prison closed.
I also work on other topics — the extraordinarily urgent climate crisis, and the unjust imprisonment of Julian Assange, to name just two — as well as chronicling London on an ongoing basis via my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, and making protest music with my band The Four Fathers.
All of this work is unpaid — or, more specifically, is only viable because of your support, so if you can make a donation to support my work, please click on the “Donate” button above to make a payment via PayPal. Any amount will be gratefully received — whether it’s $500, $100, $25 or even $10 — or the equivalent in any other currency.
Two Radio Shows: I Discuss Guantánamo and Julian Assange on TNT Radio and Parallax Views
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
This week I was delighted to take part in two interviews, to discuss the prison at Guantánamo Bay, as the 21st anniversary of its opening approaches, and the ongoing plight of Julian Assange, still held in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London, as he continues to challenge his proposed extradition to the US to face espionage charges relating to WikiLeaks’ publication of classified US documents leaked by Chelsea Manning.
On Monday, I spoke with Jason Olbourne on TNT Radio, based in Australia, in an interview that started 21 minutes into the 55-minute show. The interview is available here, and after a great introduction, in which Jason enthused about my photo-journalism project ‘The State of London’, and the music of The Four Fathers (asking if people have suggested that I sound like David Byrne), we spoke about Guantánamo, with Jason asking me to run through the story of how I first got involved with Guantánamo, in 2006, and how I worked out who was held there, and how very few of them had any meaningful involvement with Al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups.
Jason suggested that people might be held at Guantánamo in future, but was, I hope, persuaded by my explanation that Guantánamo is such a disaster area, legally, that no one with any sense would consider sending anyone there in future. I explained how the majority of the men held there were insignificant, but were tortured or otherwise abused in an effort to extract information from them, because of mistaken presumptions that they were hiding actionable intelligence — presumptions that wouldn’t have been so easy to make if the US authorities had not done away with any kind of screening process when they were first seized, and which led to Guantánamo becoming a place where the authorities’ actions resembled the witch hunts of centuries past.
Convicted Guantánamo Prisoner Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul Seeks An End to His 14 Years of Solitary Confinement
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Does anyone even remember Ali Hamza al-Bahlul?
14 years ago, on November 3, 2008, the day before Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a 39-year old Yemeni, who had been held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay since he arrived on the first flight into the prison on January 11, 2002, received a life sentence in his military commission trial, for which he had refused to mount a defense, and has been held ever since in solitary confinement.
That ought to be a shocking situation, but uncomfortable truths tend to be swallowed up in Guantánamo, and al-Bahlul’s apparently endless solitary confinement has been largely forgotten.
“Publishing Is Not a Crime”: Finally, the New York Times, the Guardian and Three Other Newspapers Urge the US to End the Prosecution of Julian Assange
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
On Monday November 28, the 12th anniversary of the “Cablegate” release of over 250,000 US diplomatic cables leaked to Wikileaks by Chelsea Manning, the editors of the New York Times, the Guardian and three other newspapers who worked on the cables as media partners — Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País — sent an open letter to the Biden administration calling on the US government “to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets,” because “[p]ublishing is not a crime.”
As the editors stated, “The Obama-Biden Administration, in office during the Wikileaks publication in 2010, refrained from indicting Assange, explaining that they would have had to indict journalists from major news outlets too. Their position placed a premium on press freedom, despite its uncomfortable consequences. Under Donald Trump however, the position changed. The DOJ relied on an old law, the Espionage Act of 1917 (designed to prosecute potential spies during World War I), which has never been used to prosecute a publisher or broadcaster.”
As they added, “This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press. Holding governments accountable is part of the core mission of a free press in a democracy. Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.”
Emergency Surgery on Iraqi at Guantánamo Reveals Cruelty of Congressional Ban on Transfers to US Mainland For Urgent Medical Care
Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
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.
Thanks to Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times for reporting on the latest news from Guantánamo about the troubling consequences of a Congressional ban on prisoners being taken to the US mainland for any reason — even for complex surgical procedures that are difficult to undertake at the remote naval base.
The ban has been in place since the early years of the Obama presidency, when it was cynically introduced by Republican lawmakers, and has been renewed every year in the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), even though, as the prisoners grow older, some of them have increasingly challenging medical issues that are difficult to resolve at the prison, where medical teams often lack equipment and personnel found readily on the mainland.
As Rosenberg explained, “The base typically sends US service members and other residents to the United States for complex care,” while shamefully denying that same level of care to prisoners, who are subject to “the constraints of so-called expeditionary medicine — the practice of mobilizing specialists and equipment to Guantánamo’s small Navy hospital specifically for the prison population.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
