Archive for June, 2023
After First Ever Guantánamo Visit, UN Rapporteur Finds Dehumanized, Traumatized Men Subjected to Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment That May Rise to the Level of Torture
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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 Monday June 26, 7,837 days since the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened, and on the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council (“independent human rights experts with mandates to report and advise on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective”) issued a devastatingly critical report about systemic, historic and ongoing human rights abuses at the prison, based on the first ever visit by a Special Rapporteur — Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, who visited the prison in February.
At the time of her visit, just 34 men were held at the prison (a number now reduced to 30), out of the 779 men and boys who have been held by the US military throughout the prison’s long history, and, as the Special Rapporteur admitted, she agreed with every “detainee or former detainee,” who, “[i]n every meeting she held” with them, told her, “with great regret,” that she had arrived “too late.”
However, it is crucial to understand that the lateness of the visit was not through a lack of effort on the part of the UN; rather, it was a result of a persistent lack of cooperation by the US authorities — part of a pattern of obstruction, secrecy and surveillance that prevented any UN visit because the authorities failed to comply with the Terms of Reference for Country Visits by Special Procedure Mandate Holders, which require “[c]onfidential and unsupervised contact with witnesses and other private persons, including persons deprived of their liberty.”
Searching for Justice at Guantánamo: The New Arab Podcast About Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, Featuring One of His Lawyers, Mansoor Adayfi and Me
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Many thanks to Nadine Talaat of The New Arab for interviewing me for a new podcast, “Searching for Justice at Guantánamo: Tainted evidence and the fight for accountability,” which you can listen to here.
The particular focus of the half-hour podcast is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a “high-value detainee,” who was held and tortured for nearly four years in CIA “black sites,” before ending up at Guantánamo in September 2006, where he has been held ever since.
Charged with terrorism-related offences in 2008, which were subsequently dropped, al-Nashiri was charged again in 2012, and has been caught up in pre-trial hearings ever since.
Guantánamo in London: Parliamentary Meeting on June 26, Amnesty Event on June 28
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In May, I reported on the inaugural meeting of the brand-new All-Party Parliamentary Group for Closing the Guantánamo Detention Facility in the Houses of Parliament, attended by six MPs and peers — Chris Law (SNP), who chaired the meeting, and is the co-chair of the APPG, John McDonnell (Lab.), Baroness Helena Kennedy (Lab.), Sir Peter Bottomley (Con.), Richard Burgon (Lab.) and Rachael Maskell (Lab.) —which was also attended by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, former Guantánamo prisoner and author of the best-selling Guantánamo Diary, and his former guard Steve Wood.
On Monday June 26 — coincidentally, and fortuitously, the UN’s International Day in Support of Victims of Torture — the APPG will be holding its second meeting, when it will formally announce its aims, and when Mohamedou will be visiting once again, with another former prisoner, Mansoor Adayfi, the author of another compelling memoir, Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, also scheduled to attend, travelling from Serbia (where he was resettled in 2016) in what will be his first visit to the UK since securing a passport a few months ago.
Khandan Lolaki-Noble, who arranged Mohamedou and Steve’s visit in April, and also organized screenings of the feature film ‘The Mauritanian’, dramatising Mohamedou’s story, is organising Mansoor’s trip, and has set up a fundraiser to pay for it, via JustGiving. If you can help out at all, please do. At the time of writing, £821 of the target of £1,500 has been raised.
Have We Already Forgotten About New York’s Apocalyptic Orange Skies, and What It Told Us About the Climate Crisis?
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For a few days, from June 7 onwards, when toxic, apocalyptic orange skies engulfed New York City and Washington, D.C., caused by wildfires in Canada burning on an unprecedented scale, it seemed that the reality of the climate crisis had finally struck home in two of the places that counted most in terms of sounding alarms in the Global North, where so much of the world’s economic and political power still resides, and where people, in general, are largely oblivious to the disasters regularly afflicting the Global South, via unprecedented heat, droughts and flooding.
For the Global North to wake up to reality, climate change, it seemed, needed to arrive on their doorstep, and for a few days the media coverage was suitably sombre, although, even then, as the worst of the pollution passed, the relentless churn of the news cycle returned to its typical dreary pattern of distraction.
Few dwelt on the irony that, as the veteran environmental activist Bill McKibben explained for the New Yorker, the arrival the toxic skies coincided with Joe Biden’s approval — to save the Inflation Reduction Act, “the first truly serious climate bill our government has ever passed” — of “the MVP pipeline, which will carry fracked gas across West Virginia and Virginia”, and which “is precisely the kind of new fossil-fuel infrastructure that climate scientists have repeatedly said we must stop building”, and of “plans for an enormous new oil-drilling complex in Alaska (and liquefied-natural-gas exports), and huge new offshore-drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico.”
UN Condemns Arbitrary Detention of Guantánamo Prisoner and Torture Victim Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, and Calls for His Release
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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.
In a truly devastating opinion, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has condemned the government of the United States for the arbitrary detention, over the last 20 and a half years, of Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, a 58-year old Saudi national who was imprisoned and tortured in CIA “black sites” for nearly four years, and who has been held, since September 2006, in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where he was brought with 13 other men described as “high-value detainees.” He is one of nine men facing charges in the prison’s largely dysfunctional military commission trial system, but, as the Working Group explained, although “pretrial hearings” in his case “began on 17 January 2012,” they “remain ongoing and no trial date has been set,” and, in a conclusion that must have unsettled the Biden administration, they called for his release.
Also implicated in his arbitrary detention are seven other countries — Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania and Thailand, where he was held in CIA “black sites,” and the United Arab Emirates, where he was first seized, without an arrest warrant, in October 2002, and interrogated for a month by Emirati intelligence operatives before being handed over to the CIA. The bulk of the Working Group’s condemnation of Al-Nashiri’s treatment is, however, focused on the US.
In recent months, the UN, which has always condemned the existence of Guantánamo and the human rights violations committed there, as well as in the CIA’s global network of “black sites,” has stepped up its criticism, issuing, via a number of UN experts, a resounding condemnation of life-threatening medical neglect in the case of Abd Al-Hadi Al-Iraqi, another “high-value detainee” (which I discussed here), and, also via the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, an opinion in the case of Abu Zubaydah — the “high-value detainee” for whom the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was developed, in the mistaken belief that the was a high-ranking member of Al-Qaeda — which was so hard-hitting that I described it as “the single most devastating condemnation by an international body that has ever been issued with regard to the US’s detention policies in the ‘war on terror,’ both in CIA ‘black sites’ and at Guantánamo.”
Grenfell Six Years On: Still Crying Out for Justice
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Six years ago today, on June 14, 2017, I watched in horror on the news as an inferno engulfed Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey block of council flats in North Kensington, in west London.
London — and the UK as a whole — would never be the same again.
Compelled to visit, as a photo-journalist covering London for my project ‘The State of London’, I cycled from my home in south east London on what was, objectively, a radiant sunny day, through a city that was going about its everyday business as though nothing had happened. It was only as I got closer and the charred, still smouldering skeleton of the tower finally rose up, make me feel slightly queasy and, disturbingly, rather ghoulish, that the enormity of what had occurred struck home.
On the ground, the local community had gone into overdrive to help the survivors, donating vast amounts of food and clothing, and seeking to do all they could to help, but, throughout this heartfelt humanitarian effort, it was clear that they were alone; no one in a position of authority was anywhere to be seen.
Quarterly Fundraiser: Seeking $2500 (£2000) to Support My Ongoing Work to Close Guantánamo Over the Next Three Months
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 make a donation to support my work as an independent journalist and activist, working to get the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed, and telling the stories of the men held there, as I have been doing for the last 17 years. I have no institutional backing for any of this work, so I really am dependent on your financial support.
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.
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Remembering Guantánamo’s Dead, on the 17th Anniversary of an Implausible “Triple Suicide”
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17 years ago, on June 10, 2006, the world awoke to the shocking news that three men had died at Guantánamo, allegedly through a coordinated suicide pact. The three men were Yasser al-Zahrani, a Saudi who was just 17 years old when he was seized in Afghanistan, Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi, who was around 30 years of age, and Ali al-Salami (also known as Ali Abdullah Ahmed), a Yemeni, who was around 23 years old.
I mark the anniversary of the deaths of these men every year, and many of us who remember that day also remember being shocked when Rear Adm. Harry Harris, the prison’s commander, told the world, “This was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us.”
However, while Harris was rightly condemned for suggesting that committing suicide — taking your own life, with no harm to others — could be considered “an act of asymmetric warfare,” not enough scrutiny has been given to the fact that there was a “war” taking place in Guantánamo, but it was not the “war” that Harris envisaged.
Photos and Report: Coordinated Global Vigils for Guantánamo’s Closure in Eleven Locations Worldwide, Including London and Washington, D.C., on June 7, 2023
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Yesterday, June 7, campaigners in eleven locations around the world held coordinated vigils calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, as the prison marked 7,818 days of its existence.
I came up with the idea of coordinated global vigils after campaigners in the UK, with the UK Guantánamo Network (which I’m part of, and which includes members of various Amnesty International groups, Close Guantánamo and other groups) began holding monthly vigils on the first Wednesday of every month outside Parliament last September, and after there had been a flurry of global activity marking the 21st anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo (on January 11), I decided to reach out to activist friends in the US, in Europe, and in Mexico City, to see if they’d be interested in joining in and making the global protests a monthly affair.
I’m glad to note that there was an enthusiastic response. Witness Against Torture and Close Guantánamo campaigners in Washington, D.C. joined us in February, the World Can’t Wait and other New York groups joined us in March, along with campaigners in Mexico City, and Brussels, Los Angeles, Raleigh, NC and Cobleskill, NY joined us in April. Last month we also welcomed Amnesty International campaigners in Copenhagen and Detroit, as well as former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi in Belgrade.
Endless Sewage and Massive Unjustifiable Profits: Renationalise the Water Industry Now!
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Two weeks ago, a revenue collector from Thames Water rang me to remind me that I was overdue paying the first two instalments of my £500+ annual bill, and I spontaneously went into a rant about how it is not a water company, but an extortion scheme for providing profits to its shareholders while failing to provide the service for which it ostensibly exists — to provide us with clean water and to manage sewage.
Last week I received an automated call demanding payment, and I’ve now paid it, because there’s no solidarity movement of other Thames Water customers, in vast numbers, also refusing to pay, and I have no choice of supplier. This is a privatised monopoly, as well as an extortion racket — although I note that anyone wanting to tackle it through concerted customer action might take heart from the fact that Southern Water customers, who are “refusing to pay their wastewater bills in protest at sewage spills by the firm”, are meeting with some success in their campaign, as the BBC reported just two weeks ago.
Like all the water companies, privatised by Margaret Thatcher in 1989, Thames Water makes vast profits while failing to do its job. In December, it announced six-monthly profits of almost £500m, and its CEO, Sarah Bentley, was paid a staggering £2m last year. Last month, responding to mounting criticism of the water companies’ profiteering, Bentley, along with the CEO of Yorkshire Water and the owner of South West Water, stated that they would be forgoing their bonuses this year, with Bentley explaining that it “just did not feel like the right thing to take performance-related pay this year.”
Who's still at Guantánamo?
