Palestinians in Guantanamo

My report about the important news that the British government has reached a “substantial” out-of court financial settlement with Guantánamo prisoner and CIA torture victim Abu Zubaydah, to prevent further public disclosure of their complicity in his torture in CIA “black sites” from 2002 to 2006, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, where he has been held ever since without charge or trial. The settlement relates to information first disclosed in a rare and frank Parliamentary investigation into British complicity in 2018, when it was revealed that the UK intelligence services had fed questions for Abu Zubaydah to US interrogators, even though they knew that he was being tortured. The payout was made to prevent full disclosure of the details after the Supreme Court ruled in Abu Zubaydah’s favor in a case decided in December 2023. Unfortunately, the settlement will do nothing to secure Abu Zubaydah’s release from Guantánamo. Although the US authorities long ago walked back from claims that he was a significant member of Al-Qaeda, which they made after his capture, and has never charged him with a crime, he continues to be held at Guantánamo, one of three “forever prisoners” detained indefinitely. This is in spite of two European Court of Human Rights rulings, in 2014 and 2018, condemning his torture in “black sites” in Poland and Romania, which also led to significant financial settlements, and a devastating opinion issued by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in 2023, which called for his release and reparations for his suffering during his long and arbitrary imprisonment. Under Donald Trump, however, when an unarmed 37-year old mother and US citizen murdered by an ICE agent is described as a “domestic terrorist” by senior administration officials, there can be no real likelihood that a torture victim slandered as a terrorist for years, and still routinely referred to as a “terror suspect”, will be freed. As his ordeal continues, we must all reflect on how, while three governments have paid him significant amounts of money for their complicity in his torture, no mechanism exists that can compel his actual torturers to free him.

News of an important complaint filed with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, on behalf of Abu Zubaydah, held in CIA “black sites” for four and a half years, and at Guantánamo since September 2006, without ever being charged. The complaint is not only against the US, but also against Thailand, Poland, Morocco, Lithuania and Afghanistan (the five countries in which he was held in “black sites”), as well as the UK, which is regarded as complicit in his torture.

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 of the Trump administration.   I was on vacation recently when a terrible anniversary passed unnoticed by the mainstream media — the 16th anniversary […]

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo for the next three months.   On Tuesday, I wrote about the recent decision, by a Periodic Review Board, to approve the ongoing imprisonment of Abu Zubaydah, one of 14 men described as “high-value detainees,” who […]

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo for the next three months.   On October 27, it was announced that Abu Zubaydah, the supposed “high-value detainee” for whom the US’s post-9/11 torture program was initiated, had his ongoing imprisonment recommended by a Periodic […]

On August 23, 2016, the most notorious torture victim in Guantánamo, Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, better known as Abu Zubaydah, became the 61st prisoner to face a Periodic Review Board, and was seen for the first time by anyone outside of the US military and intelligence agencies, apart from representatives of the International Committee of […]

Ever since it was first announced, over a year ago, that six Guantánamo prisoners would be resettled in Uruguay, I have followed the story closely. Uruguay was a fascinating choice for resettlement, with its humble, left-wing president who had also been a political prisoner, and in December, when the six men were freed, there was […]

In December, the release of six Guantánamo prisoners in Uruguay attracted the attention of the world’s media — in part because Uruguay’s President Mujica was a former political prisoner, who had openly criticized Guantánamo and had welcomed the men as refugees. At the time, the situation looked hopeful for the men — four Syrians, a […]

I’m just catching up on a story from two weeks ago that I was unable to post at the time because I was busy with another couple of stories — the dismissal of David Hicks’ Guantánamo conviction, and the ongoing campaign to free Shaker Aamer. The story I didn’t have time to report involved the […]

Good news from Uruguay, where five of the six men released from Guantánamo on December 7 and given new lives in Montevideo have been photographed out and about in the city. From left to right, in the photo, they are: Ali Hussein al-Shaaban, Ahmed Adnan Ahjam and Abdelhadi Omar Faraj (all Syrians), Tunisian Abdul Bin […]