Majid Khan Released From Guantánamo to New Life in Belize; 20 Others Approved for Release But Still Held Must Now Be Prioritized by Biden
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Congratulations to Majid Khan, the former Guantánamo prisoner who is beginning a new life in the central American coastal country of Belize, formerly known as British Honduras when, for over a century, it was under British rule.
Now 42 years old, Khan spent almost half his life in US custody, and was, for most of that time, one of the most profoundly isolated prisoners in the whole of the “war on terror.” He is the first of 16 “high-value detainees” held at Guantánamo to be released, the sixth prisoner released under President Biden, and the first of these six to be resettled in a third country.
Seized in Karachi in March 2003, Majid Khan disappeared into the CIA’s global network of “black sites” for three and a half years — when his family had no idea of his whereabouts — until President Bush announced in September 2006 that he was one of 14 ”high-value detainees” transferred from the CIA’s secret torture prisons to Guantánamo.
Video: Moazzam Begg, Anas Altikriti and I Discuss ‘Guantánamo: 21 Years On’ on Al Hiwar TV’s New Show, ‘The London Circle’
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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.
Emergency Surgery on Iraqi at Guantánamo Reveals Cruelty of Congressional Ban on Transfers to US Mainland For Urgent Medical Care
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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.
Thanks to Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times for reporting on the latest news from Guantánamo about the troubling consequences of a Congressional ban on prisoners being taken to the US mainland for any reason — even for complex surgical procedures that are difficult to undertake at the remote naval base.
The ban has been in place since the early years of the Obama presidency, when it was cynically introduced by Republican lawmakers, and has been renewed every year in the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), even though, as the prisoners grow older, some of them have increasingly challenging medical issues that are difficult to resolve at the prison, where medical teams often lack equipment and personnel found readily on the mainland.
As Rosenberg explained, “The base typically sends US service members and other residents to the United States for complex care,” while shamefully denying that same level of care to prisoners, who are subject to “the constraints of so-called expeditionary medicine — the practice of mobilizing specialists and equipment to Guantánamo’s small Navy hospital specifically for the prison population.”
Somali Prisoner at Guantánamo, Approved for Release a Year Ago, Calls on a US Court to Act on His Case
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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.
Recently, in London, campaigners for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay held a vigil outside the US Embassy, by the River Thames in Nine Elms, at which, using the slogan, “Free the Guantánamo 20,” they highlighted the plight of the 20 men still held at Guantánamo, out of 35 prisoners in total, who have been approved for release by high-level government review processes, but are still held.
As I explained in an article about the vigil, the problem for the men approved for release is that the processes that led to their approval for release — initially, under President Obama, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, and, since 2013, the Periodic Review Boards — are ”purely administrative, and no legal mechanism exists to compel the US government to actually free [them].”
This is a shameful state of affairs, as is apparent from a moment’s reflection about how disgraceful it would be if no legal mechanism existed to compel the government to release people from federal prisons after they had completed their sentences, but at Guantánamo, of course, the men approved for release haven’t even been charged with a crime.
Completely Unnoticed, CIA Torture Victim Abu Faraj Al-Libi Has His Ongoing Imprisonment Without Charge or Trial Approved by a Guantánamo Review Board
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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.
On August 23, a Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo (an administrative, parole-type review process established by President Obama, featuring high-level US government officials) approved the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of Abu Faraj al-Libi, one of 14 “high-value detainees” who were brought to Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and the last of the 14 to be captured.
Al-Libi’s hearing took place on June 23, and was the first time he had engaged with the PRB process since it was established in 2013. This ought to be have been newsworthy, but, in fairness, no media outlet could have been expected to know that he would finally deign to appear at the hearing, after refusing to take part in any previous opportunities to engage with the US authorities — or with the wider world.
However, it is a sad sign of the general lack of media interest in the shameful extra-judicial world of Guantánamo, where he has been held for 16 years without charge or trial, that only one media outlet — the New York Times — even bothered to find out what the board decided in his case after this first, momentous personal appearance, with veteran Guantánamo reporter Carol Rosenberg tweeting on August 29, “Just in: The Guantánamo review board has upheld the indefinite detention of the never charged former CIA prisoner called Abu Faraj al-Libi.”
My Reflections on Guantánamo and the 21st Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks and a Video of My Interview on Salaamedia in South Africa
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Today marks the 21st anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 people lost their lives in coordinated terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
Sadly, it also marks the launch, in response, of a global ”war on terror” by the administration of George W. Bush that led to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, a 20-year endeavor that ended in humiliation last year when the US withdrew from Afghanistan, handing the country back to the Taliban; the illegal occupation of Iraq; the shredding of the Geneva Conventions in both countries; the establishment of a global, extrajudicial program of kidnapping, torture and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial that, between 2002 and 2006, involved the CIA establishing and running numerous “black sites” (torture prisons) around the world; and the creation of a prison at Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba, where 779 men (and boys) have been held by the US military since it opened on January 11, 2002.
Since 2006, I have assiduously chronicled the monstrous injustices of Guantánamo, sought to expose and tell the stories of the prisoners held there — most of whom had nothing whatsoever to do with international terrorism — and campaigned for the prison’s closure, and two days ago, to mark the 21st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was delighted to be interviewed by Inayat Wadee, of Salaamedia in South Africa, about the anniversary, and about the shameful ongoing existence of Guantánamo, where 36 men are still held.
The US Government’s Entirely Predictable Problems with Resettling Guantánamo Prisoner Majid Khan
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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.
It’s difficult enough to get out of Guantánamo at the best of times, and considerably more difficult when the US authorities have to find a third country prepared to take in former prisoners, generally because it is unsafe for them to be returned to the countries of their birth.
In dozens of resettlement cases over the years, the US government has made resettlement additionally difficult by refusing to concede that the men in question might have been fundamentally insignificant by sharing assessment files from Guantánamo with the governments of these countries (fundamentally, the files released by WikiLeaks in 2011), which, more often than not, are full of lies about the prisoners, extracted from their fellow prisoners under duress, or through the promise of favorable treatment, to justify their lawless imprisonment (without any adequate screening at the time of capture) in the first place.
Last week, a new twist on these difficulties came to light in the District Court in Washington, D.C., as Justice Department lawyers sought to prevent a judge from addressing a habeas corpus petition submitted by the Pakistani national Majid Khan, who has been imprisoned at Guantánamo since September 2006, and who previously spent three and a half years in CIA “black sites,” where he was subjected to torture.
The US’s Ongoing “Forever Prisoner” Problem at Guantánamo
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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.
It’s now over 20 years since, in response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Bush administration declared that it had the right to hold indefinitely, and without charge or trial, those seized in the “war on terror” that was launched after the attacks.
As a result of the US turning its back on laws and treaties designed to ensure that people can only be imprisoned if they are charged and put on trial, or held until the end of hostilities as prisoners of war, the men held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay have struggled to challenge the basis of their imprisonment.
For a brief period, from 2008 to 2010, the law actually counted at Guantánamo, after the Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, and 32 men were freed because judges ruled that the government had failed to establish — even with an extremely low evidentiary bar — that they had any meaningful connection to either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. However, this brief triumph for the law came to an end when politically motivated appeals court judges passed a number of rulings that made successful habeas petitions unattainable.
Majid Khan’s Sentence Ends, But, Disgracefully, He’s Still Trapped at Guantánamo, Along with 19 Other Men Approved for Release
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Over ten years ago, on February 29, 2012, Majid Khan, a Pakistani national held at Guantánamo since September 2006, and previously held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for three and a half years, agreed to a plea deal in his military commission trial at Guantánamo, admitting that, as an Al-Qaeda recruit, he had taken $50,000 from Pakistan to Thailand as funding for the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, whose attack on a hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia in August 2003 killed 12 people.
Khan, who had already been in a CIA “black site” for five months when the attack happened, was thoroughly remorseful about his actions, and agreed to cooperate with the US authorities, providing information that would help in the prosecution of others involved in terrorism, both at Guantánamo and elsewhere. In exchange, it was promised that his sentence would be capped at 19 years from the time of his capture; in other words, that it would be served by March 5, 2022.
At the time, his sentencing was due to take place in four years’ time — in 2016 — but delays in the broken military commission system, which I wrote about here and here, meant that he was not finally sentenced until October last year, when he was finally allowed to describe, in harrowing detail (as I posted here and here), his horrendous treatment at the hands of the CIA, and the authorities in Guantánamo, and also to explain at length how, as a young man distraught at the death of his mother, he was preyed on by Al-Qaeda members, taking advantage of his vulnerability. He also, as has been apparent throughout his imprisonment, once more apologized profusely for his crimes.
In Abu Zubaydah Case, Justice Gorsuch Lays Bare the US Government’s Shameful and Enduring Torture Problem
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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.
As we settle into the third decade since the 9/11 attacks, and the US’s brutal and counter-productive response to it — the establishment of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and a global program of kidnapping, rendition and torture in CIA “black sites” — the US government is still furiously engaged in efforts to hide the evidence of what it did to whom, and where, even though much of that information is in the public domain, and has been for many years.
A case in point is a recent Supreme Court ruling in the case of Abu Zubaydah, for whom the post-9/11 torture program was first developed, in the mistaken belief — which the US government has since walked back from — that he was a major player in Al-Qaeda. Zubaydah, a stateless Palestinian, whose real name is Zain al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was seized in a house raid in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, and was taken to the CIA’s first black site, in Thailand. He was then moved to further “black sites” in Poland, in Guantánamo itself, and in Morocco and Lithuania, before ending up back at Guantánamo in September 2006, with 13 other “high-value detainees,” where he has been held ever since without charge or trial.
The case before the Supreme Court didn’t involve the question of whether, after 20 years, Abu Zubaydah should be released, as one of a number of “forever prisoners” who have never been charged, although that is a perfectly valid question — and one that, in the last year, prompted 99 lawmakers to write to President Biden to urge him to release everyone still held at Guantánamo who hasn’t been charged, a total of 26 of the 38 men still held, including Abu Zubaydah.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
