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It’s over two weeks since Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, died at the age of 84, and, after a brief flurry of mainstream media activity, in which the immensity of his war crimes and crimes against humanity (for which he was never indicted)  was largely whitewashed through mentions of how, although he was a “divisive” figure, he was also a towering presence in US politics, the media moved on, only waking up again yesterday when his funeral service was held in Washington, D.C., at which former presidents and vice presidents, lawmakers and Supreme Court Justices all ignored the horrors of his legacy.

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Joe Biden attended, as did former Vice Presidents Kamala Harris, Al Gore, Dan Quayle and Mike Pence. Also present were the Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell, Democratic Senator Nancy Pelosi. former House Speaker John Boehner, former national security advisor John Bolton, and Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Elena Kagan.

Biden’s attendance struck me as particularly grimly appropriate, because his “ironclad” support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, in which he referred to the attacks of October 7, 2023 as Israel’s 9/11, has always struck me as nothing less than a transfer of Cheney’s lawless and violent post-9/11 policies of vengeance from the US itself to Israel, a parallel made all the more alarming because, of course, Israel is a foreign country, even though Biden’s actions did more than any previous president to foster the illusion that, actually, the US is nothing more than a colony of Israel.

Notable absences were Barack Obama, who had, nevertheless, posted condolences on November 5, in which he stated that, “Although Dick Cheney and I represented very different political traditions, I respected his lifelong devotion to public service and his deep love of country”, and both Donald Trump and JD Vance, who had not been invited. Trump has, noticeably, made no public comments whatsoever about Cheney’s death, although Vance expressed his condolences at a Breitbart News event on Thursday, in which he also made reference to “some political disagreements” between Trump and Cheney. 

That was something of an understatement, as Cheney had condemned Trump’s 2020 vote-rigging claims and his subsequent support for the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and had endorsed Kamala Harris over Trump in last year’s Presidential Election, when he said that “there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump.” In response, in a rare moment of clarity, Trump shot back that Cheney was the “King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars.”

In some ways, of course, Cheney was undoubtedly correct about the threat posed by Trump, as Trump’s concept of the presidency seems mainly to be that he perceives the role as granting him the power to act like an erratic and completely unaccountable emperor, although, as the primary architect of the post-9/11 “war on terror”, the unapologetic driver of the CIA’s repulsive “black site” torture program, and the chief instigator of the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, which led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, Cheney himself posed an extraordinary threat to the US republic, which he never acknowledged, and which has been noticeably absent from mainstream media coverage since his death.

As well as tearing up all domestic and international laws and treaties regarding the pursuit of war and the treatment of prisoners, Cheney maintained a lifelong obsession with unfettered executive power, which, for the republic, was his most devastating legacy, as it so fundamentally weakened the checks and balances built into the Constitution, and, ironically, paved the way for Donald Trump to so breezily assume that there ought to be no constraints on his own power.

I’m pleased to have marked Cheney’s passing with critical commentary about the multitude of crimes for which he was never held accountable — in my article on my website here about how his death coincided with the latest monthly global vigils for Guantánamo’s closure, as well as 8,700 days of the prison’s existence, as well as in a follow-up article on the Close Guantánamo website, No Tears for Dick Cheney on Guantánamo’s 8,700th Day of Existence.

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On June 19, 2024, Khaled Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, became the first lawyer to visit a notorious detention facility for Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, located inside the Sde Teiman military base in the Negev Desert, one of several detention facilities established after October 7, 2023 to hold Palestinians seized in Gaza.

Speaking to +972 Magazine a week after his visit, Mahanjeh drew a pertinent comparison with the treatment of Muslim prisoners in the US’s post-9/11 “war on terror”, but concluded that Israel’s behavior was even worse.

“The situation there is more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo”, he said, adding, “I have been visiting political and security detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails for years, including since October 7. I know that the conditions of detention have become much harsher, and that the prisoners are abused on a daily basis. But Sde Teiman was unlike anything I’ve seen or heard before.”

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For anyone concerned with human rights and international humanitarian law, two dates in 1948 — December 9 and December 10 — are of crucial importance, as these are the dates when the recently-formed United Nations, via its General Assembly, idealistically and optimistically adopted, on December 9, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention), and, the day after, adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which established, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected, and which, as the UN explains, “inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties.” Ever since, December 10 — today — has been known and celebrated as Human Rights Day, while December 9 is marked as the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime.

One of those subsequent treaties is the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the Torture Convention), which, after decades of wrangling, was finally adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1984, the 36th anniversary of the UDHR, expanding on Article 5 of the Declaration, which states, unequivocally, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

The Genocide Convention, and the long quest for accountability

The Genocide Convention, drawing on the work of the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term during the Second World War, defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — “killing members of the group”, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”, and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

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On July 31 this year, a truly historic event took place at Guantánamo — in the military commissions, the trial system established to prosecute prisoners charged with acts of terrorism.

After two and a half years of negotiations between three of the men charged in connection with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, their prosecutors and their defense teams, the Convening Authority for the Commissions, retired US Army Brigadier General Susan K. Escallier (who was previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals), entered into three separate pretrial agreements (PTAs) with Khalid Shaykh Mohammad (KSM), the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, and two of his alleged accomplices, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi. Of the five men originally charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, one other man, Ammar al-Baluchi, is still involved in negotiations regarding his case, while the fifth, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was ruled “unfit to stand trial” by a DoD Sanity Board last year.

Two days after the plea deals were announced, however, they were rescinded by the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, in a decision that, shamefully, demonstrated a commitment to undying vengeance in defiance of reality on the government’s part, coupled with fear of even greater reality-defying vengefulness from Republicans.

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Sad news from Pakistan, where, on Friday November 1, former Guantánamo prisoner Abdul Rahim Ghulam Rabbani (ISN 1460) died at just 57 years of age. Abdul Rahim is on the right in the photo, with former Pakistani Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan in the center and Abdul Rahim’s younger brother Ahmed on the left.

Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, the brothers had lived in Saudi Arabia, where their uncle was the imam of a mosque in Medina, and held Pakistani passports, but they were seized in Karachi during a number of house raids on September 11, 2002, and were then held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for a year and a half before arriving at Guantánamo in September 2004, where they were held without charge or trial for 18 and a half years until their release in February 2023.

The US authorities liked to claim that the brothers were “Al-Qaeda facilitators”, but they clearly had no evidence, as neither man was ever charged in the prison’s court system, the military commissions, and it seemed much more probable that they were, as they attested, a chef and a taxi driver. Nevertheless, they were repeatedly recommended for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial by various high-level government review processes until May 2021, when Abdul Rahim was recommended for release by a Periodic Review Board, with a similar recommendation for Ahmed following in October 2021.

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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.

In depressing but sadly predictable news regarding the prison at Guantánamo Bay and its fundamentally broken military commission trial system, the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has stepped in to torpedo plea deal agreements with three of the men allegedly involved in planning and executing the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which were announced just 48 hours before in a press release by his own department, the Department of Defense.

The three men in question are Khalid Shaikh Mohammad (KSM), the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Walid Bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and, although the full details of the plea deals were not made publicly available, prosecutors who spoke about them after the DoD’s press release was issued confirmed that the three men had “agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges in exchange for a life sentence rather than a death-penalty trial.”

The plea deals, approved by the Convening Authority for the military commissions, Army Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier, who was previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals, would finally have brought to an end the embarrassing and seemingly interminable efforts to prosecute the three men, which began sixteen and a half years ago, and have provided nothing but humiliation for four successive US administrations — those led by George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

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This is the fifth in a new series of ten articles, alternately posted here and on the Close Guantánamo website, telling the stories of the 16 men still held at Guantánamo (out of 30 men in total), who have long been approved for release from the prison by high-level US government review processes, but have no idea of when, if ever, they will actually be freed. The first four articles are here, here, here and here.

Shamefully, these men are still held because the reviews were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists to compel the US government to free them, if, as is apparent, senior officials are unwilling to prioritize their release.

To be fair, most of these men cannot be repatriated, because of US laws preventing the return of men from Guantánamo to countries including Yemen, where most of the men are from, but if senior officials — especially President Biden and Antony Blinken — cared enough, these men would already have been freed, and the suspicion, sadly, must be that they are failing to do anything because the they don’t want to upset the handful of Republican lawmakers who are fanatical in their support for Guantánamo’s continued existence, while they seek the GOP’s cooperation in funding military support for Israel and Ukraine.

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Three weeks ago, I began a new Guantánamo project, telling the stories of the 16 men who have been approved for release from the prison, in an effort to humanize them, to remind the world of their existence, and to highlight the disgracefully long amount of time that they have been held since being approved for release.

I’m alternating publication of the articles here and on the Close Guantánamo website, tying them in to noteworthy dates relating to how long they have been held since the US authorities first decided that they no longer wanted to hold them. The first article focused on the case of Uthman Abd Al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, a Yemeni who, on February 7, had been held for 1,000 days since being approved for release, and the second focused on Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah, another Yemeni, who, on February 11, had been held for 1,200 days since being approved for release. For the fourth article, about Abdulsalam Al-Hela and Sharqawi Al-Hajj, see here.

The reason these men have been held for so long without being freed is, sadly, because the decisions taken to release them — via Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type review process established by President Obama in 2013 — were purely administrative, meaning that the US government has no legal obligation to free them, and they cannot, for example, appeal to a judge to order their release if, as has become sadly apparent, the government has failed to prioritize their release.

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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.

Last month, two men that almost no one has heard of — despite them being held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for three years, and then held at Guantánamo for over 17 years — entered guilty pleas in their military commission trial at the war court on the grounds of the US military base in Cuba where the prison is located.

The two men are Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, 47, and Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, 48, the only two Malaysians held at Guantánamo. Designated as “high-value detainees,” they were brought to Guantánamo in September 2006 with 12 other “high-value detainees,” who had also been held and tortured for years in CIA “black sites.”

However, like most of these 14 men, their stories are largely unknown to the majority of US citizens, and to the majority of those in the US who claim to be journalists, even though, if we were to attach a Bush administration-approved description to them, it would be that they were, allegedly, “the worst of the worst of the worst.”

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Last week, hot on the heels of my interview about Guantánamo with Kevin Gosztola and Rania Khalek for their “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast, I was delighted to speak again to Scott Horton, the indefatigable interviewer, author and libertarian, who I’ve been talking to on and off for the last 16 years. Scott works so hard that this was, astonishingly, his 5,935th interview!

The focus of our half-hour interview was my recent article, Trial Judge Destroys Guantánamo’s Military Commissions, Rules That “Clean Team” Interrogations Cannot Undo the Effects of Torture, about the recent devastating ruling by Col. Lanny Acosta, the trial judge in the military commission pre-trial hearings (now in their 12th year) for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of being the mastermind of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, who was held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for nearly four years before his transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006.

Al-Nashiri had made self-incriminating statements under torture, but the government knew that these could not be used in court, and so, four months after his arrival, a so-called “clean team” of interrogators interviewed him non-coercively, apparently securing voluntary self-incriminating statements. It is these statements, however, that Col. Acosta has just ruled inadmissible, because, as he established, the regime of torture and confession in the “black sites” was so enduring that al-Nashiri had essentially been “conditioned” to believe that, if he didn’t tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear, he would inevitably be subjected to horrendous torture.

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