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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

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.

When it comes to the crimes committed by the US government in the brutal “war on terror” declared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the wheels of justice move so slowly that their motion is almost imperceptible.

A case in point involves four survivors of the CIA’s rendition and torture program — British residents Binyam Mohamed and Bisher al-Rawi, Abou Elkassim Britel, an Italian citizen, and Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni. Also see my extensive archive about Binyam Mohamed’s case, which I covered in great detail in 2008 and 2009.

Last month, on July 8, in what the ACLU accurately described as a “historic decision,” the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights — an international human rights tribunal based in Washington, D.C., which reviews cases throughout the Americas, and whose judgments are meant to be binding on the states involved — determined that the four men, “survivors of the US secret detention and torture program,” have “the right to present their case before the regional tribunal.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Monday January 11 is the 14th anniversary of the opening of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, and, as over a dozen rights groups hold a protest outside the White House, calling for President Obama to close Guantánamo in his last year in office, seven former Guantánamo prisoners from the UK will gather outside the US Embassy to also demand the closure of the prison.

The seven former prisoners are Shaker Aamer, Moazzam Begg, Ruhal Ahmad, Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul, Bisher al-Rawi and Tarek Dergoul.

Ruhal Ahmad, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul (the Tipton Three) and Tarek Dergoul were released in 2004, Moazzam Begg was released in 2005, Bisher al-Rawi in 2007, and, after extraordinary campaigning from activists, MPs and the media, Shaker Aamer was released on October 30, 2015, eight years after he was first told that the US no longer wanted to hold him.

As the co-founder and co-director of the We Stand With Shaker campaign (with Joanne Macinnes), I will be taking part in the protest outside the White House, as part of a short tour to coincide with the 14th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, and I have brought with from the UK the giant inflatable figure of Shaker Aamer that was the centerpiece of the campaign. The photo above is of Shaker outside the US Embassy on January 7, when Joanne MacInnes and I met up with him to take the photo with campaign photographer Stefano Massimo. Read the rest of this entry »

With the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo fast approaching (on January 11), I was delighted that, on Sunday, the Observer not only ran a double-page feature about the British ex-prisoners (and Shaker Aamer, the last British prisoner still held), but also that Tracy McVeigh, Chief Reporter for the Observer, spoke to me on the phone, quoted me in the article, and used my phrase “toxic legacy” to describe Guantánamo since outgoing President George W. Bush handed it on to President Obama, who, notoriously, failed to close it within a year, as he promised when he took office three years ago.

As I have been explaining since the 9th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo a year ago, it is now appropriate to regard most of, if not all of the remaining 171 prisoners as political prisoners, given that the Obama administration, Congress and the judiciary have all made sure that Guantánamo may never close, and that few, if any of the remaining prisoners will ever be released, even though 89 of them were cleared for release (or, technically, “approved for transfer”) by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established in January 2009.

The situation is no better for the other 82 prisoners, who are either scheduled to face trials that, in most cases, show no signs of materializing, or, in 46 cases, have been specifically designated as prisoners to be held indefinitely without charge or trial by President Obama, in an executive order last March. Although the President promised periodic reviews for these prisoners, his executive order essentially enshrines the indefensible —  indefinite detention without charge or trial — as an official policy of his administration, even though he and senior officials have been at pains to point out that it applies only to these men, and is not to be construed as lending credibility to indefinite detention in general. Read the rest of this entry »

In a triumph for the principles of open justice, and a snub to the Tory-led coalition government, the British Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday that the government and the intelligence agencies cannot use secret evidence in court to prevent open discussion of allegations that prisoners were subjected to torture.

The appeal, by lawyers for MI5 — but with the explicit backing of the government — sought to overturn a ruling in the Court of Appeal last May, when judges ruled that the intelligence services could not suppress allegations, in a civil claim for damages submitted by six former Guantanamo prisoners, that the British government and its agents had been complicit in their ill-treatment. The six are Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga, and they argued, as the Guardian put it, that “MI5 and MI6 aided and abetted their unlawful imprisonment and extraordinary rendition.”

The ruling last May precipitated a huge crisis in the government, as the first of hundreds of thousands of classified documents emerged from the court, revealing the extent to which Tony Blair and Jack Straw were up to their necks in wrongdoing, preventing consular access to a British citizen in Zambia, in Tony Blair’s case, and in Straw’s, approving the rendition of British citizens to Guantanamo the day before the prison opened in January 2002. I covered this story in detail in my article, UK Sought Rendition of British Nationals to Guantánamo; Tony Blair Directly Involved. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the dying days of the Bush administration, when the Supreme Court savaged the indifference of the executive branch and of Congress towards the cruel mess they had created at Guantánamo, by ensuring that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, it has, sadly, all been downhill when it comes to judicial oversight of the national security state. Moreover, in two recent decisions, the Supreme Court has shown indifference to torture, either in the past or in the future.

In the three years since that landmark case, Boumediene v. Bush, the prisoners’ initial success in the District Court in Washington DC., where they won 38 of the first 52 cases, has been abruptly halted, as right-wing judges in the D.C. Circuit Court, led by Senior Judge A. Raymond Randolph, have pushed back, insisting that little evidence is required to continue holding men indefinitely, even if, as in most cases, they were nothing more than insignificant foot soldiers for the Taliban, rather than international terrorists.

In response to this repeated hurling down of gauntlets by Judge Randolph, who is notorious for approving every piece of Guantánamo-related legislation that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court, there has been no repeat of Boumediene. In the last few months, lawyers for the prisoners have tried to undermine Judge Randolph and his colleagues on numerous fronts. Eight Guantánamo cases have made their way to the Supreme Court, as SCOTUSblog reported back in December, but all have failed. Read the rest of this entry »