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Three weeks ago, on October 10, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel issued a hugely significant report about Israel’s “war on hospitals” in the Gaza Strip over the last year, and its treatment of Palestinians in its accountable prison system, where torture, rape and murder are all widespread.

I wrote about the “war on hospitals” in a previous article, UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals, when I promised to follow up with a second article about the Commission’s findings regarding Israel’s prisons, and this article is my fulfilment of that promise.

When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, around 80% of the Palestinian population — 750,000 people — were ethnically cleansed from their homes in what is known as the Nakba (“catastrophe”), fleeing or being forcibly expelled as refugees into the West Bank (then controlled by Jordan), the Gaza Strip (then controlled by Egypt), Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. None of them — or their descendants — have ever been allowed to return.

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Many thanks to my truth warrior colleague Chris Cook, in western Canada, for having me on his Gorilla Radio show again to discuss last week’s General Election in the UK, following up on my article, Despite the Landslide, Labour Have No Vision and Only Won the UK General Election Because the Tories Lost So Spectacularly.

Our interview, available on Chris’s Substack here, took place in the second half of the one-hour show, following his interview with journalist and author John Helmer about Russia and Ukraine.

Chris and I spent most of our half-hour interview discussing the collapse of the Conservative Party — who lost two-thirds of their seats — after the 14 unbearably long years of their increasingly deranged rule, which became noticeably more septic after the vote to leave the EU in 2016, and also discussing the largely empty promise of their replacements, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer, who, because of the vagaries of Britain’s antiquated and anachronistic ‘First Past the Post’ voting system, won a landslide victory, despite securing less votes than Jeremy Corbyn did as Labour’s leader in the General Elections of 2017 and 2019.

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I’m delighted to promote ‘Guantánamo: 21 Years On’, the very first episode of a new English language show, ‘The London Circle’, broadcast by the Arabic news channel Al Hiwar TV, which reaches millions of viewers throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

For the opening show, I was invited to join a discussion with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg, hosted by Anas Altikriti, the CEO and founder of the Cordoba Foundation, which was established in 2005 “to provide a strong voice of tolerance and reason in promoting dialogue and a rapprochement between Islam and the West.”

The one-hour discussion was envisaged by Anas as a free-wheeling conversation rather than the regimented question and answer format of most news discussions, and I thought it was very successful. The video is posted below, via YouTube, and I hope that you’ll have the time to watch it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.

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Yesterday, I was delighted to talk to Chris Cook, for his Gorilla Radio show, broadcast every Thursday morning on CFUV 101.9FM in Victoria, on Vancouver Island in Canada. Chris and I have spoken many times over the years, and his show admirably fulfills its remit to cover topics relating to “social justice, the environment [and] community,” and to “provid[e] a forum for people and issues not covered in the corporate media.”

Chris and I spoke in the second half of the one-hour show, which is available here as an MP3.

At the start of the show, Chris spoke about the US’s recent drone attack in Afghanistan, in which civilians, mistakenly identified as ISIS-K terrorists, were killed. He noted that Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has “expressed regret for those killed in what he characterized a ‘mistake with horrific consequences,’” but asked, pointedly, “why America was continuing its attacks against the country it has reportedly withdrawn from.”

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In the last few weeks, since the last US troops left Afghanistan and the Taliban swept into Kabul, bringing the US’s nearly 20-year occupation of the country to an ignominious end — in defeat — I’ve been thinking about the extent to which that defeat is linked to the existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the significance of the Afghans held there — around 220 in total — as well as the numerous other Afghans held in the US’s prison at Bagram Airbase.

When we think of Guantánamo, we have been encouraged to think of the “high-value detainees” moved there from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, or the hundreds of Arabs — mostly Saudis and Yemenis — who had been in Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and who were subsequently regarded as terrorists, even though most of them had only gone to Afghanistan to help the Taliban secure victory in their long-standing inter-Muslim civil war with the Northern Alliance.

And yet the Afghans were the largest group by nationality who were held at Guantánamo, and from the beginning their treatment in US prisons in Afghanistan, and the subsequent rendition of many of them to the lawless prison on the US naval base in Cuba was revelatory in terms of understanding the shameful extent to which the US failed to win the “hearts and minds” of the people it was supposedly liberating.

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My thanks to Jenifer Fenton, for remembering the foreign nationals that the US left behind when it handed over Bagram prison in Afghanistan to the Afghan authorities in December 2014.

I used to write regularly about Bagram, a place of notorious torture and abuse, where an undisclosed number of prisoners died at the hands of US forces, because it had been the main processing prison for Guantánamo, and, under Barack Obama, had become a legal battlefield, as lawyers tried to secure habeas corpus rights for the men held there, so that they would at least have had comparable rights to the prisoners held at Guantánamo, who secured constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights via the Supreme Court in June 2008, even though appeals court judges subsequently gutted habeas of all meaning for them. My extensive archive of articles about Bagram is here, and in 2010 I published the first annotated list of all the prisoners held there.

Bagram was re-named the Parwan Detention Facility in 2009, and the old Soviet building that had housed America’s notorious prison — as horrendous as Abu Ghraib in Iraq, but without the photographic evidence to prove it — was subsequently destroyed by the US. The prison was handed over to the Afghan authorities in March 2013, with the final relinquishing of control taking place at the end of December 2014. Prior to this, in September 2014, I covered the US’s efforts to repatriate prisoners it had held there, in an article entitled, Two Long-Term Yemeni Prisoners Repatriated from Bagram; Are Guantánamo Yemenis Next?, in which I noted how a US military official had told the Washington Post that, at the time, the number of prisoners in US custody in Bagram — none of whom were Afghans — was down to 27. By the time of the final handover, there were just six foreign nationals held, and two of these men — Tunisians previously held in “black sites” — were freed in 2015. For an update from December 2014, see this Newsweek article, and other links here. Also see this Afghan Analysts Network article by Kate Clark from May 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

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At the start of this month, Donald Trump transferred his first prisoner out of Guantánamo, the Saudi citizen Ahmed al-Darbi, who was repatriated as part of a plea deal arranged in his military commission proceedings in February 2014. However, he did not return home a free man, as, in his homeland, he will serve the remainder of a 13-year sentence agreed in his plea deal.

As I explained in an article at the time, “Under the terms of that plea deal, al-Darbi acknowledged his role in an-Qaeda attack on a French oil tanker off the coast of Yemen’s coast in 2002, and was required to testify against other prisoners at Guantánamo as part of their military commission trials, which he did last summer, and was supposed to be released on February 20 this year. However, February 20 came and went, and al-Darbi wasn’t released, a situation that threatened to undermine the credibility of the military commission plea deals.”

Al-Darbi’s transfer saved the only functioning part of the otherwise broken military commission trial system, which is incapable of delivering justice in an actual trial, given that the men in question, although accused of serious crimes, were lavishly subjected to torture over a number of years, and the use of torture, to be blunt, fundamentally undermines any possibility of a fair and just trial. 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.

Just over ten years ago, on May 1, 2008, one of the better-known prisoners at Guantánamo, the Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj (aka al-Haj), was freed from the prison and repatriated to his home country of Sudan. I meant to mark the occasion with an article, but, at the time, I was caught up in issues involving my campaigning for social housing in the UK, and the local government elections that took place on May 3.

Now, however, belatedly, I’m getting round to it, as I want to promote ‘Prisoner 345: My Six Years in Guantánamo,’ Sami’s powerful and emotional account of his capture and imprisonment, which is available for free as a PDF via Al-Jazeera.

Sami’s story was of particular interest during his imprisonment because he was working for Al-Jazeera as a journalist and cameraman at the time of his capture, and his captors quite shamelessly tried to get him to work for them instead — as well as very publicly threatening the Qatar-based channel by imprisoning, without charge or trial, one of their journalists. 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.

On March 6, indefatigable Guantánamo chronicler Carol Rosenberg, of the Miami Herald, reported that the Pentagon “plans to tear down Camp X-Ray, a weed-filled warren of chain-link-fence cells where the Bush administration held its first 311 war-on-terror prisoners at Guantánamo — and famously released a photo of kneeling captives in orange jumpsuits that stirred allegations of torture.”

Rosenberg added that, for many years, the prison’s various commanders had said that the site “was under a federal court protective order and could not be razed.” However, on March 5, Justice Department attorney Andrew Warden wrote to lawyers who represent Guantánamo prisoners, informing them that “the FBI has created an interactive, simulated three-dimensional, digital virtual tour of Camp X-Ray that shows all areas of the camp where detainees were held, interrogated, or otherwise present.”

Rosenberg added that “Trump administration attorneys consider it a suitable substitute,” and also explained that, although the prison supposedly closed in April 2002, when the first more permanent cells of Camp Delta were erected, it was used later in 2002 for the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi prisoner regarded as the intended 20th hijacker for the 9/11 attacks. Just before George W. Bush left office, Susan Crawford, the convening authority of the military commission trial system set up under Bush at Guantánamo, explained to the Washington Post that she had refused to have al-Qahtani prosecuted because of the torture to which he was subjected, which included sleep deprivation, being threatened by dogs, sexual abuse, forced nudity, being shackled in painful positions, and being physically beaten. 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.

Last week I was delighted to be invited to discuss Guantánamo, George W. Bush, torture and the “war on terror” by Scott Horton, the libertarian, Texan-based radio host, and the author of Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, in which, as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg notes in a review, he “masterfully explains the tragedy of America’s longest war and makes the case for immediate withdrawal.”

Scott and I have been talking several times a year — and sometime more frequently — since September 2007, when we first spoke about the case of US “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla, tortured on the US mainland. Our interviews have generally been for 20-25 minutes, but for our latest interview the brakes were off, and we spoke for a whole hour.

The show is available here, or here as an MP3, and I wholeheartedly recommend it as a tour through the darkness of the “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks, as manifested in CIA “black sites,” in the CIA’s “extraordinary renditions” to torture prisons in other countries, in Guantánamo, and in the wars — and the accompanying lawless prisons — in Afghanistan and Iraq. We also looked at the sad failures of the Obama years — not only his failure to close Guantánamo, but how extrajudicial assassination by drones replaced the messy detention, rendition and torture program of the Bush years, but is no more legally or morally acceptable. Read the rest of this entry »