Yemenis in Guantanamo

My analysis of the significance of a DoD Sanity Board’s assessment that Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, who are caught up in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings in Guantánamo’s broken military commissions, is unfit to stand trial because he suffers from PTSD and psychosis. That assessment has been accepted by the military judge in the 9/11 case, but meanwhile President Biden has refused to accept conditions requested by the 9/11 co-accused in plea deals that have been ongoing for the last 18 months, since prosecutors finally recognized that the use of torture had made a successful trial untenable. The conditions include the lifelong provision of adequate physical and mental health care, which has not been provided at Guantánamo, and which, ironically, has contributed significantly to bin al-Shibh’s inability to stand trial.

My report about last week’s Guantánamo events in London – the second meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Closure of the Guantánamo Detention Facility, attended by former prisoners Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Moazzam Begg, and an Amnesty International event featuring Mohamedou, and, via Zoom, former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi.

Remembering Yasser al-Zahrani, Mani al-Utaybi and Ali al-Salami, the three men who died on this day at Guantánamo 17 years ago. The official narrative — that they committed suicide — is no more plausible than it was then, and other deaths at Guantánamo, also described as suicides, also remain suspicious.

An exclusive article about the latest court hearing in the case of Khalid Qassim, a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo whose lawyers are seeking to persuade a judge to order his release on the basis that, as someone seized after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan as a soldier, with no connection to terrorism, he must be released now that the war in Afghanistan is definitively over. The case was heard in December, in the District Court in Washington, D.C., before Senior Judge Thomas Hogan, and was argued by Tom Wilner, who was Counsel of Record to the Guantánamo prisoners in their Supreme Court cases establishing their right to habeas corpus in 2004 and 2008.

My report about the significance of the first ever visit to Guantánamo by a UN Rapporteur, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, and the additional news that, after a letter from Fionnuala Ní Aoláin and another Rapporteur, a Trump-era ban on prisoners leaving Guantánamo with their artwork has just been dropped.

An update on the story of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who was given a life sentence after a one-sided military commission trial at Guantánamo in 2008, when he refused to mount a defence, and who, disgracefully, has been held ever since in solitary confinement. As his lawyers appeal to the court of appeals in Washington, D.C., I look at their submission, and review the history of his legal challenges against his conviction, which has, over the years, involved most of the charges on which he was convicted being overturned.

Promoting a letter to President Biden from eight former Guantánamo prisoners, urging him to drop a ban on released prisoners leaving with their artwork, or even giving it as gifts to their lawyers (and, via them, to their family members), which was imposed under Donald Trump in November 2017, in response to Pentagon hysteria about an exhibition of prisoners’ artwork in New York.

Following up on a powerful BBC report by Joel Gunter about the art produced by Guantánamo prisoners, which was banned from leaving the prison under Donald Trump, a ban that, shamefully, President Biden has not reversed.

My report about the news that “forever prisoner” Khaled Qassim, a talented artist, has finally been approved for release from Guantánamo by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process established under President Obama. Despite never having been anything other than a low-level soldier in Afghanistan, Khaled continued to be held because of his non-compliance while at Guantánamo. Now, however, he has finally convinced the authorities that he doesn’t pose a threat, although all that means in practical terms is that he joins a queue of 20 other prisoners awaiting release. Is there no end to the casual but profound injustice of Guantánamo?

I mark the 16th anniversary of the deaths of three men at Guantánamo, and revisit the implausibility of the official narrative, which is that they committed suicide. This is an act of remembrance that I engage in every year, and this year I include new information about the events of that particular night that was provided by former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi in his memoir ‘Don’t Forget Us Here,’ published last summer.