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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 two weeks since Spencer Ackerman published an article on his Forever Wars website by former Guantánamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, featuring the first ever interviews with two of his friends, the artists Moath Al-Alwi and Khalid Qassim, who were finally freed from Guantánamo in January this year, and resettled in Oman, after being held for nearly 23 years without charge or trial.

I’m cross-posting it below, following my own introduction, in the hope that it will reach some readers who never saw the original posting.

I’ve long followed the story of these two men, including Moath having his habeas corpus petition turned down via some inadequate legal reasoning in 2009, and both men taking part in various hunger strikes, including the prison-wide hunger strike in 2013. This, and the global outrage that greeted it, finally persuaded President Obama to overcome his inertia, prompted by obstacles raised by Republicans to try to prevent him releasing prisoners, which meant that almost no prisoners were freed for two and a half years before the mass hunger strike began in February 2013.

It wasn’t until November 2017, however, that I became aware of the talents of both men as artists, when “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo,” an exhibition of artwork by eight prisoners — some released, and some still held — took place at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which I was fortunate to attend in January 2018, and which I wrote about here.

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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.

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 genuinely dispiriting news, Spencer Ackerman has reported, via his Forever Wars website, that the majority of the 28 former Guantánamo prisoners from Yemen who were resettled in Oman between 2015 and 2017 have been forcibly repatriated to their home country over the last few weeks.

The news is particularly dispiriting because, until now, the Sultanate of Oman had appeared to be one of the most successful countries involved in resettling former Guantánamo prisoners, all unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, but who could not be safely repatriated.

This was either because the State Department regarded it as unsafe for them to be sent home (on the basis of human rights concerns, or concerns about their potential recruitment or targeting by forces hostile to the US), or because provisions inserted by Republicans into the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) proscribe certain countries, including Yemen, from receiving their citizens (again, for reasons of national security), or, in a few cases, because they were essentially stateless.

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