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Wonderful news from Guantánamo, as Mohammed Abdul Malik Bajabu, the prison’s sole Kenyan prisoner, and one of 16 men who had long been approved for release, has been repatriated and reunited with his family, leaving 29 men in total still held at the prison.

The release confirms that, behind the scenes, the Biden administration has taken seriously the scandal of holding 16 men unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes — decisions that were taken between two and four years ago, and in three outlying cases, nearly 15 years ago.

Bajabu, with two other men, was approved for release by a Periodic Review Board, a parole-type process established by President Obama in 2013, almost three years ago, on December 27, 2021, but had not been freed in part because the review process is purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists to compel the government to free any of these men if they cannot be bothered or find it politically inconvenient.

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100 Former Guantánamo Prisoners, Ex-US Government Officials, Lawyers, Academics, Psychologists, Public Figures and Rights Organizations Send Letter to President Biden Urging Him to Free the 16 Men Still Held at Guantánamo Who Have Long Been Approved for Release; Second Letter is Sent by 40 British MPs and Peers, Academics and CEOs of UK Rights Organizations

Today, December 6, 2024, 100 individuals and organizations — including 36 former Guantánamo prisoners, 36 ex-US government officials, lawyers, academics, psychologists and public figures, and 28 rights organizations — have written to President Biden, with a second letter sent simultaneously by 40 British MPs and peers, academics and the CEOs of UK rights organizations, to urge him to take urgent action to free 16 men still held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay (out of 30 in total) who have long been approved for release.

These decisions, which were unanimously agreed through robust, high-level US government review processes, took place many years ago — between two and four years ago, and in three outlying cases nearly 15 years ago.

The former prisoners signing the US and international letter include the authors Mansoor Adayfi and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and the supporters include Larry Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the musician and activist Roger Waters.

The UK letter includes 20 Parliamentarians, the Chief Executive of Amnesty International UK, and the film director Kevin Macdonald (‘The Mauritanian’).

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Many thanks to Kevin Gosztola for not forgetting about Guantánamo, and for spending an hour with me online last week to discuss in detail the grave legal and human rights abuses still taking place at the US’s shameful “war on terror” prison, as it nears the 23rd anniversary of its opening.

Kevin and I have known each other for many years, and our paths have crossed on occasion on the annual visits to the US that I undertook every January from 2011 to 2020 to call for the closure of Guantánamo on the anniversary its opening, as well as during his long dedication to addressing the persecution of Julian Assange, with whom I worked in 2011 on the release of classified military files from Guantánamo.

In recent years, he’s one of the few journalists to have maintained an interest in Guantánamo, interviewing me for his “Unauthorized Disclosure” podcast on a more or less annual basis, in 2020, 2021 and 2023.

For our latest update, available below via YouTube, we began by discussing the half a billion dollars that it costs to keep the 30 men still held at Guantánamo — the 16 men in the “general population” who have all been approved for release, 13 other “high-value detainees”, charged in the military commissions, or, in three cases, held indefinitely without charge or trial as “forever prisoners”, and one man serving a life sentence in solitary confinement.

We then proceeded to discuss two particularly pressing concerns — the military commissions, and the plight of the men approved for release.

On the military commissions, we followed up on my recent article, Military Judge at Guantánamo Restores 9/11 Plea Deals, Rules Lloyd Austin Had No Right to Withdraw Them Three Months Ago, in which I discussed the shameful situation whereby plea deals, carefully negotiated for the last two and a half years by prosecutors and defense attorneys for three of the men charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, signed at the end of July, were rescinded two days later by defense secretary Lloyd Austin.

This eminently sensible decision, which finally involved a recognition by prosecutors that the use of torture in CIA “black sites” had fatally contaminated the possibility of successful prosecutions, took the death penalty off the table, in exchange for confessions and life sentences, representing the only practical way for there to be closure — not only for the US establishment, humiliated internationally by its inability to successfully prosecute these men, but also, crucially, for the 9/11 victims’ families.

Now, however, the military judge in the 9/11 case, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, has thrown a colossal spanner in the works by ruling that Austin had no right to rescind the plea deals, paving the way, hopefully, for the submission of statements in January, before Donald Trump takes office and takes a wrecking ball to the entire operation — if, that is, the Biden administration can be persuaded not to appeal Judge McCall’s forensic humiliation of the Pentagon’s untenable thirst for unachievable vengeance.

Turning to the prisoners long approved for release but still held, we followed up on another recent article of mine, Free the Guantánamo 16: A Message to President Biden as His Time Runs Out, and discussed the horrendous plight of these men, who have been unanimously approved for release by high-level government review processes, but are still held because those decisions were purely administrative, meaning that no legal mechanism exists that can compel the government to free them if, as has become increasingly apparent since the most recent prisoner release, back in April 2023, the Biden administration has been unwilling to prioritize freeing them.

With time running out before Donald Trump takes over, once more sealing the prison shut, and with third countries having to be found that will offer new homes for these men (because of Republican Congressional bans on repatriating them), I explained how a plan to resettle most of these men in Oman, stopped over a year ago because of the unconnected events of October 7 in Israel, needs to be urgently revived, or a new country needs to be found that will take them in.

At the end of the show, Kevin turned his attention to my band The Four Fathers, who, nine years ago, were featured by Kevin as “Protest Song of the Week”, for our song for the campaign to free Shaker Aamer from Guantánamo, on Shadowproof, the website that he ran at the time. This time around, Kevin promoted our new album, “Songs of Loss and Resistance”, which is available on Bandcamp, to download, or as a limited edition CD, and which features songs recorded over the last six years dealing with Guantánamo’s “forever prisoners”, the persecution of Julian Assange, climate collapse, the Grenfell Tower fire, and much more.

I’m grateful to Kevin for highlighting The Four Fathers’ ongoing protest music, and delighted to note that he has just revived his focus on protest music via The Protest Music Project on Substack — which, with his encouragement, I’ve also joined, and where I’ll be publishing a weekly newsletter linking to all my work on an ongoing basis. Please join me!

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.

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.

As the dust settles on last week’s Presidential Election, and the US and the rest of the world wait anxiously to see quite what Donald Trump has planned for the future, one policy decision seems unlikely to offer any surprises.

As in his first term in office, Trump — who is very evidently Islamophobic (as we all ought to recall from his Muslim ban in 2017), and is the head of a debased Republican Party that contains numerous screamingly hysterical enthusiasts for the continued existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay — will almost certainly seal Guantánamo shut, as he did in his first term, refusing to set any prisoner free unless, by some miracle, they are required to be freed through legal means.

For the 30 men still held at Guantánamo, the situation is remarkably similar to that which faced President Obama eight years ago, as the news sank in that Hillary Clinton would not be taking over from him, and that Donald Trump would soon be inheriting Guantánamo, which he had bullishly promised to “load up with some bad dudes.” In the end, that threat never materialized, as, even in Trump’s inner circle, enough common sense existed to recognize that Guantánamo was an unsalvageable legal mess, and that, for any “bad dudes” that Trump managed to round up, prosecuting them in federal courts would be the only sensible option.

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If you have half an hour to spare, I hope you’ll watch my interview about the prison at Guantánamo Bay with Scottie Nell Hughes, on her show 360 View, as featured on the online TV channel Sovren Media, in which the other featured guest was the conservative talk radio host Steve Gill.

Scottie and I had spoken previously when she worked for RT America, between 2018 and the channel’s politically motivated closure in 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it was good to be given an opportunity to elucidate some of the many incontrovertible reasons why this festering sore from the US’s brutal and lawless post-9/11 experiments in torture, dehumanization and endless imprisonment without charge or trial should be shut down.

I’m glad to say that I was given plenty of time to explain the reasons that Guantánamo must be closed, and should have been “a long, long time ago”, as I put it — because it is, as I also explained, “a legal, moral and ethical abomination, and a great shame for the United States every day that it remains open.”

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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 NBC News, and the four anonymous US government officials who spoke to them, for exposing the latest scandal involving the US prison at Guantánamo Bay — the refusal of the Biden administration to release eleven men, for whom long months of negotiation had secured a safe and viable resettlement option, because of the perceived “political optics” of freeing them after the attacks on Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7.

Within Guantánamo circles, this scandal was well known, but attorneys for the men had been subjected to a Protective Order issued by the government, preventing them from talking about it, and, as a result, they had all dutifully kept quiet, as had others, like myself, who had got to know about it.

Their silence is, in itself, an indictment of how the US government operates at Guantánamo, as I also recognised when I refused to publicize it, because of the fundamentally lawless situation in which these men are held.

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Today marks 900 days since Sanad al-Kazimi, a 54-year old Yemeni, and a father of four, was unanimously approved for release from Guantánamo by a Periodic Review Board, a high-level US government review process established under President Obama.

This article, telling his story, is the ninth in an ongoing series of ten articles, published since early February, telling the stories of the 16 men (out of 30 still held at Guantánamo in total) who have long been approved for release. The articles are published alternately here and on the Close Guantánamo website, with their publication tied into significant dates in their long ordeal.

While most of the 779 men held at Guantánamo since it opened over 22 years ago were picked up — or bought — in Afghanistan or Pakistan and processed through military prisons in Afghanistan before their arrival at  Guantánamo (mostly between December 2001 and November 2003), al-Kazimi was one of around 40 prisoners whose arrival at Guantánamo involved a more circuitous route, through the network of CIA “black sites” established and run in other countries between March 2002 and September 2006, and, in some cases, in proxy prisons in other countries run on behalf of the CIA.

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Sunday (March 10) marked 600 days since Khaled Qassim (aka Khalid Qasim), a 47-year old Yemeni, was unanimously approved for release from Guantánamo by a Periodic Review Board, a high-level US government review process.

That decision took place on July 19, 2022, but nearly 20 months later Khaled is still awaiting his freedom, a victim, like the 15 other men unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, of an inertia at the very top of the US government — in the White House, and in the offices of Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State.

For the last year and a half, an official in the State Department — former ambassador Tina Kaidanow — has been working on resettling the men approved for release, most of whom, like Khaled, are Yemenis, and cannot be sent home because of a ban on their repatriation, inserted by Republicans into the annual National Defense Authorization Act in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, and renewed every year since.

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Thanks to Chris Cook for having me on his Gorilla Radio show in Victoria, in western Canada on Wednesday to talk about a number of topics. The one-hour show is available here, on Chris’s Substack account, and my interview took part in the first half.

Chris began by asking me about the recent by-election victory, here in the UK, of George Galloway, the former Labour MP, who destroyed both Labour and the Tories on a platform opposing their unconditional support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which, of course, is also opposed by a majority of the population. As he stated in a tweet after his victory, “Gaza is the moral centre of the world right now.”

Chris asked me about the government’s hysterical response, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivering a special address to the nation to complain about the threat posed by a democratically-elected MP, but with, of course, a darker undercurrent of groundless suggestions that British democracy is under threat from “Islamist extremists” — all part of the desperate, flailing efforts of the British establishment to criminalize all criticism of Israel’s actions as anti-semitic.

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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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