If You Can, Please Support the Guantánamo Survivors Fund This Holiday Season
22.12.22
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.
Instead, however, many have found themselves fundamentally without rights — often regarded with suspicion by their host governments, and subject to being arbitrarily harassed, or even imprisoned, preventing from working, prevented from traveling, or from having visits from family members.
Disgracefully, these former prisoners have no fundamental rights as human beings, and whatever was agreed between their host countries and the U.S. government regarding their treatment, and their host country’s obligations, was agreed in secret, and has never been publicly disclosed in any cases.
Next year, I’ll be launching a new initiative, the Guantánamo Accountability Project, to address the shameful fact that former prisoners remain fundamentally without rights, even after their release, and to call for this disgraceful state of affairs to be brought to an end, but for now I’d like to invite you to support the Guantánamo Survivors Fund, established in April this year to provide help with medical care, rent, language classes, tuition and job training for former prisoners struggling to survive.
The Guantánamo Survivors Fund was established by No More Guantanamos, the Muslim Counterpublics Lab, Witness Against Torture and Healing and Recovery After Trauma, and former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi is their Outreach Consultant.
Since their launch, they have raised over $34,000 to help seven men and their families with their needs, including housing, health care and transportation, and are currently trying to raise that amount to $37,500. Any donations made by December 31 will be matched dollar-for-dollar by a generous supporter.
To donate, please visit the funding page here.
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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.
To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
7 Responses
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
Here’s my latest article, publicizing a fundraising appeal by the Guantanamo Survivors Fund, which was established in April this year to provide help with medical care, rent, language classes, tuition and job training for former prisoners abandoned by the US after their release — mostly those sent to third countries, because they could not be safely repatriated, or because Congress passed laws preventing their repatriation.
Shamefully, former Guantanamo prisoners remain fundamentally without rights on their release from the prison, forever tainted with the label of having been “enemy combatants”, even though the overwhelming majority of them were never charged with a crime.
Next year, I’ll be launching the Guantanamo Accountability Project, a long-term project aiming to hold the US government accountable for the lawlessness and the crimes of Guantanamo, and also to address the disgraceful situation that former prisoners find themselves in, as they seek to rebuild their lives without any fundamental rights.
For now, however, if you can help, the Guantanamo Survivors Fund is at the frontline of helping a number of former prisoners struggling to survive, having been shamefully abandoned by their former captors.
...on December 22nd, 2022 at 6:36 pm
Anna says...
Oops, did it again, pressed the Submit button while the Captcha was not yet in view and therefore I forgot about it. Too late at night to reproduce my lofty support for this initiative, so I paraphrase : even the smallest gift magically becomes twice as big, so no excuses not to donate now !
And could your website guru please move the Submit button lower, under the Capcha … 🙂 ?
...on December 27th, 2022 at 2:26 am
Andy Worthington says...
Good to hear from you, Anna, and thanks for your support for the Guantanamo Survivors Fund – a very worthwhile initiative!
I’m not sure I have a ‘website guru’ as such, but a supporter kindly updated the site a while back, and I think I may be due another update, so I’ll try and remember to ask about it.
...on December 27th, 2022 at 9:29 pm
Anna says...
The most recent addition to my ‘multiple standards’ file :
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/28/us-marks-four-year-anniversary-of-paul-whelan-detention-in-russia
On Wednesday, Blinken said Whelan and his family are “suffering through an unfathomable ordeal”, and he again condemned the American’s conviction, which was based on secret evidence.
“His detention remains unacceptable, and we continue to press for his immediate release at every opportunity,” Blinken said. “Our efforts to secure Paul’s release will not cease until he is back home with his family where he belongs.” Hear, hear !
I personally would not at all be surprised by the way, if that man really was a spy. They do exist after all, usually have a more presentable occupation as a cover and their families are expected to be ignorant of their under cover work !
A few days ago Blinken had a similar opinion about the taliban blocking women from nearly everything now :
“What they’ve done is to try to sentence Afghan women and girls to a dark future without opportunity,” Blinken said during an end-of-year news conference in Washington, DC.
“And the bottom line is that no country is going to be able to succeed – much less thrive – if it denies half its population the opportunity to contribute”.
The US blocking 7 billion USD of Afghanistan’s (not the taliban’s) sovereign fund, which cripples its economy and denies ALL of its population a future with any opportunity, of course is irrelevant.
His criticism of Russian destruction and murder in Ukraine of course ignores Israel behaving similarly (admittedly at a slower pace) in Palestine, thus implicitly condoning & abetting it. This latest news no doubt will not lead to any sanctions either, just an ‘expression of worry about these developments’ or something similarly non-committal:
“Benjamin Netanyahu’s incoming hardline Israeli government has put settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank at the top of its list of priorities, a day before it is set to be sworn into office.
Netanyahu’s Likud party released the new government’s policy guidelines on Wednesday, the first of which promises to “advance and develop settlement in all parts of the land of Israel – in the Galilee, Negev, Golan Heights, and Judea and Samaria” – the Biblical names for the occupied Palestinian West Bank.”
Horrendous Putin claims land Russia lost merely a few decades ago, Israel goes back 2000 years to support its claims to Palestine. Zero accountability.
Blinken may be more sophisticated than his predecessor Pontius Pompeus, but his contents are just as despicable, just as Biden is basically the same as his predecessor, sometimes even worse, certainly in international affairs.
Migrants dropped on Christmas in front of Kamala Harris’ home were not even invited in for a cup of hot cocoa before being bussed away to some shelter in the middle of the night. But there you are, as they of course all are ‘criminals, thieves, pickpockets’ etc, I suppose they would be expected to take off with the family silverware !?
Nothing like US (and increasingly also European) hypocrisy to make my blood boil. And journalists increasingly docile repeating such crap instead of calling it out for what it is : an abomination.
...on December 28th, 2022 at 7:33 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Well said, Anna. Hypocrisy and warmongering from the US as usual, so that it matters little that, if one were to get stuck in a lift with Blinken, it would presumably not be as obviously horrible as being stuck in a lift with Pompeo.
As for Europe, I thought this analysis from the Guardian was quite good yesterday: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/27/the-guardian-view-on-europes-radical-right-crossing-the-cordon-sanitaire
...on December 29th, 2022 at 12:44 am
Anna says...
From the US not even the usual bland ‘expression of concern’ … https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/29/biden-says-he-looks-forward-to-working-with-netanyahus-new-govt
Not really a surprise, but no less of a disaster for that matter.
Will read the Guardian tonight.
...on December 29th, 2022 at 10:58 pm
Andy Worthington says...
It’s shameful watching western leaders, not just Biden, queuing up to welcome Netanyahu back, Anna. Ursula von der Leyen, for example, tweeted, “Congratulations Benjamin Netanyahu on your 6th term as Prime Minister of Israel. Looking forward to working on strengthening our partnership, promoting peace in the Middle East and addressing the shockwaves of Russia’s war against Ukraine.” https://twitter.com/vonderleyen/status/1608512029207457794
“Promoting peace in the Middle East”?
...on December 31st, 2022 at 1:34 am