Audio: I Discuss ‘Life at Guantánamo: Writing Behind Bars’ with Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Mansoor Adayfi at Amnesty International’s London HQ in June 2023

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.

 

It’s taken a long time to make this available, but I hope that you’ll have the time to listen to the audio recording of a powerful and moving event that took place at Amnesty International’s London headquarters on Wednesday June 28, 2023.

‘Life at Guantánamo: Writing Behind Bars’ featured Mohamedou Ould Slahi, as the author of the best-selling Guantanamo Diary, and, from Serbia, via Zoom, Mansoor Adayfi, the author of Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo, which was published in 2021. Mansoor was supposed to be with us in person, but had not been given a visa in time, although he has subsequently managed to successfully visit the UK on several occasions, including a memorable visit to the Houses of Parliament last October, which I wrote about here.

I was the moderator for the event, and Sara Birch, the Convenor of the UK Guantánamo Network, was also on the panel, and it was, I think it’s fair to say, a resounding success, with, in particular, a powerful rapport between Mohamedou, Mansoor and myself.

The audio recording is embedded below, via YouTube:

In the first eight minutes or so, I provided an overview of the prison’s history, bringing the story up to date — at the time — by discussing the report about Guantánamo that had just been issued by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, who was the first UN Rapporteur to visit the prison in February 2023.

Fionnuala’s devastating report was witheringly critical about the US’s persistent failure to “provide any torture rehabilitation to detainees,” the continuing violence at the prison, the “structural and entrenched physical and mental healthcare deficiencies,” the “inadequate access to family,” and the “ongoing, arbitrary detention characterized by fair trial and due process violations,” and she concluded that “the totality of these factors, without doubt, amounts to ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment”, and “may also meet the legal threshold for torture.”

Sadly, however, although I expressed my hope at the time that Fionnuala’s report would make a difference, it was largely brushed aside by the Biden administration, continuing the refusal, by whoever is in power in the US, to recognize and address the systemic, persistent and grave human rights abuses taking place at Guantánamo in any meaningful way.

I then asked Mohamedou and Mansoor about the challenges of writing at Guantánamo, with Mansoor in particular providing a long and enthralling account of learning English at the prison, and discovering the power of writing, despite the many obstacles raised by the authorities, and Mohamedou adding some fascinating insights into the creative process, and the pain involved in telling a truthful story, which, in his case, involved him drawing on his extraordinarily bleak experiences at Guantánamo, where he was subjected to a vile torture program designed specifically for him, and was largely held in isolation throughout his long imprisonment.

Mohamedou also spoke poignantly about some of the men killed by the US in the “war on terror”, who never got to tell their story, which led to my concluding remarks, providing a summary of the men still held at Guantánamo, and the difficulties many released prisoners face, even when they have somehow managed, miraculously, to escape from a facility that only very reluctantly opens its doors to release anyone from Guantánamo’s primary purpose: imprisoning Muslim men endlessly without charge or trial, in defiance of all domestic and international laws and treaties governing the deprivation of liberty.

I do hope that you have time to listen to the event, which included an extensive question and answer session at the end, and I’d like to reiterate my thanks to Amnesty International UK for having hosted this significant event, and for having recorded it so that, eventually, it has become available for a wider audience.

Note: On Thursday December 5, Mansoor and Andy will be speaking at the launch of “Don’t Forget Us Here”, named after the title of Mansoor’s book, an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ art at Rich Mix in Shoreditch, organized by the UK Guantánamo Network and Amnesty International UK, which runs until January 5, and on Saturday December 7 they will be speaking at Amnesty’s Amplify Festival in Woolwich. Further details about both events are here.

* * * * *

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 (see the ongoing 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, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his 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.