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Sometimes, when darkness is all around, just one small ray of light is sufficient to keep hope alive.

A week ago, on November 15, amidst the almost all-encompassing darkness of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, that small ray of light was provided when former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi was welcomed into the Palace of Westminster, the home of the British Parliament, by Chris Law, the SNP (Scottish National Party) MP for Dundee East, who is the co-chair of the recently established All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for the Closure of the Guantánamo Detention Facility.

Mansoor — the very definition of human irrepressibility — was held for over 14 years at Guantánamo before being resettled in Serbia in July 2016, where his outspoken nature and complaints about his treatment (which included a ban on travelling outside Serbia) led, for many years, to harassment and intimidation from the Serbian authorities.

This is a situation that only slowly began to change when he started having articles published in the New York Times, related to his involvement in “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay”, a significant exhibition of artwork by current and former prisoners at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which ran from October 2017 to January 2018.

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

Last week was another good week for Guantánamo activity in the UK — on the part of politicians, former prisoners, lawyers and activists — as the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Closure of the Guantánamo Detention Facility held its second meeting, and Amnesty International hosted an event at its London HQ about former prisoners’ memoirs, and the power of writing.

On Monday June 26 — the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture — the second meeting of the APPG for Guantánamo’s closure took place in the Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament), following the inaugural meeting in May, which I wrote about here.

That meeting featured former prisoners Mohamedou Ould Slahi, visiting from his home in the Netherlands, and his former guard Steve Wood, visiting from the US, and for this second meeting Mohamedou made a return visit, joined this time by another former prisoner, the British citizen Moazzam Begg, who introduced the members of the APPG to Yusuf Mingazov, the son of another former prisoner, Ravil Mingazov.

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

Last week was a big week for Guantánamo activism in the UK, as the inaugural meeting of the brand-new All-Party Parliamentary Group for Closing the Guantánamo Detention Facility took place in the Houses of Parliament, attended by former prisoner and best-selling author Mohamedou Ould Slahi and his former guard Steve Wood, who then, in the following days, attended three screenings of ‘The Mauritanian’, Kevin Macdonald’s feature film about Mohamedou, followed by Q&A sessions in which I was also involved.

The inaugural meeting of the APPG was attended by six MPs and peers — Chris Law (SNP), who chaired the meeting, and is the co-chair of the APPG, John McDonnell (Lab.), Baroness Helena Kennedy (Lab.), Sir Peter Bottomley (Con.), Richard Burgon (Lab.) and Rachael Maskell (Lab.).

Layla Moran (Lib Dem) is the other co-chair of the APPG, but was unable to attend because of other pressing commitments, although her assistant Emilia Harvey was there to represent her. All were voted in as officers of the APPG.

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

On Monday April 24, at 5.30pm, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Closing of the Guantánamo Detention Facility will be holding its inaugural meeting in Committee Room 19 of the Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament). Members of the public are welcome, but the room only holds a maximum of 40 people. If you want to attend, please enter by the Cromwell Green entrance from 3.45pm onwards. Campaigners, myself included, will be in the Palace of Westminster’s cafe from 4pm.

The co-chairs of the new APPG are Layla Moran MP (Liberal Democrat) and Chris Law MP (SNP), and other MPs include Sir Peter Bottomley (Conservative), Caroline Lucas (Green) and the Labour MPs John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, Rachael Maskell and Andy Slaughter. Peers include Sayeeda Warsi (Conservative) and the Labour peers Helena Kennedy, Shami Chakrabarti and John Hendy.

At this inaugural meeting, as a press release from Amnesty International UK explains, “the group of MPs and peers will hear an update on the current situation at Guantánamo, which still holds 30 detainees, 16 of them cleared for release but still detained.”

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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 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.

For the 16th anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a cross-party group of British MPs have written to Donald Trump, and to Republican Senators John McCain and Bob Corker, the chairs of two influential Senate Committees (the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations), to urge action on Guantánamo after a year in which no prisoner has been released, despite five of the 41 men still held being approved for release, between 2010 and 2016, by high-level government processes established under President Obama. Throughout 2017, Donald Trump also made it clear that he has no interest in closing the prison, and would like to expand its use.

Almost as soon as Trump took office last January, a leaked draft executive order revealed that he wanted to keep Guantánamo open, wanted to send new prisoners there, and wanted to “suspend any existing transfer efforts pending a new review as to whether any such transfers are in the national security interests of the United States.” He also wanted to reinstate torture and the use of CIA “black sites.”

Trump’s enthusiasm for torture was immediately rebuffed by a wide range of critics, including many in his own administration and his eagerness to send new prisoners to Guantánamo has also not led to any new arrivals at the prison, for sound reasons that we hope remain flagged up throughout the rest of his presidency. Set up to be beyond the reach of the US courts, Guantánamo was never about justice or due process, but about using torture and abuse and then hiding it, and as the troubled history of the military commissions reveals, once prisoners have been tortured, it is difficult, if not impossible to bring them to justice. Trump’s advisers have undoubtedly also told him that US courts have a strong track record of successfully prosecuting those accused of terrorism. Read the rest of this entry »