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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.

17 years after the US tore up international and domestic laws and treaties regarding the treatment of prisoners, in the “war on terror” that George W. Bush declared in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and which led to the establishment of CIA “black sites” and the prison at Guantánamo Bay, those decisions continue to cast a baleful shadow on notions of domestic and international justice.

A case in point concerns foreign nationals seized during the horrendous war in Syria over the last eight years. 

From the start of his presidency, Donald Trump made it clear that he wanted to send new prisoners to Guantánamo, and those involved in Daesh (more commonly referred to in the West as ISIS or the Islamic State) were particularly singled out.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed, and the proposals came to nothing. Some of those advising Trump pointed out that it seemed probable that a new Congressional authorization would be required to send prisoners to Guantánamo who were not explicitly involved with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or the 9/11 attacks, and, in any case, others recognized that Guantánamo was no place to send anyone if there was any intention of delivering anything resembling justice. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Britain has a dark and brutal history, but principled members of its establishment played a major part in establishing fundamental human rights following the horrors of the Second World War, only to see those rights undermined when it didn’t suit the government — in Ireland in the 1970s, for example, and, since 9/11, as the US’s stoutest ally in the law-shredding “war on terror” that the Bush administration declared after the terrorist attacks.

Just months after 9/11, Tony Blair began imprisoning foreign nationals, suspected of involvement with terrorism, without charge or trial, and on the basis of secret evidence, and his government also subjected British terror suspects to internal exile and house arrest under “control orders.”

When the Tories took over in 2010, promises made by David Cameron to banish this bleak landscape were quickly sidelined, and Theresa May’s six-year tenure as home secretary, from 2010 to 2016, was a horrendously dark and racist time, as May sent vans around Britain’s streets telling immigrants to go home, crowed at the Conservative Party conference about extraditing Muslim terror suspects to the US, just after refusing to allow a white Briton to be extradited, persistently stated her vile authoritarian desire to remove the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights, and, in 2013, stripped two dual national British citizens of their British citizenship, while they were in Syria, and then told the US government where they were, so they could be killed in drone strikes. I reported all off this, and more, in an article in July 2016 entitled, As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration. Read the rest of this entry »