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

How time flies. It’s almost a week since I left the US after my annual visit to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the anniversary of its opening, and here I am still posting videos and audio links of shows I took part in.

That’s a good sign, however. On the last two anniversaries, the focus on Guantánamo had almost entirely disappeared. Two years ago, we were caught in the limbo between the outgoing administration of Barack Obama and the imminent arrival of Donald Trump, and last year, after Trump’s first year in office, the outrage and exhaustion was such that Guantánamo barely got a look-in.

A year on, and you’d be excused for thinking that the situation would only be worse, but although that certainly seems true when it comes to Trump — now obsessed with his Mexican wall, and having shut down the federal government for the longest period in US history (marking a calendar month today) — it is not true of those opposing him on many fronts, including Guantánamo. Read the rest of this entry »

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

It’s now nine days since the 17th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo — a day that I marked by flying to New York, taking the bus to Washington, D.C., appearing at an annual panel discussion at the New America think-tank (broadcast live by C-SPAN), and taking part in another annual event: a vigil outside the White House, featuring members of the campaigning group Witness Against Torture and speakers from over a dozen rights groups, including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Reprieve US. The video of the entire vigil is here.

I also took over 40 photos of campaigners with posters showing how Guantánamo had been open for 6,210 days on the anniversary — posters I had made via the Close Guantánamo campaign that I co-founded seven years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner — and I published them on our website and on social media, and on my return to New York I undertook a number of TV and radio appearances. I wrote about some of these events, TV shows and radio appearances here and here, and will be posting another article bringing the story up to date in a few days’ time, but for now I wanted to share with you another project I undertook during the vigil — taking photos, which are available on my Flickr page, to add to previous sets I posted in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

I know that the best opportunity for there to be interest in these photos was as soon as possible after the event — or even tweeted or posted to Instagram or Facebook at the time — but the problem with fixating on the media moment is that, nine days later, no one notices that the problem that needed highlighted has now been forgotten. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m nearing the end of my ten-day trip to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the 17th anniversary of its opening, and in this article I’d like to follow up on my previous analysis of what I’ve found on trip, as explained in my article, On My Annual US Visit to Call for the Closure of Guantánamo, Reporting Resistance in Trump’s Shutdown America.

In that article, I linked to a panel discussion at the New America Foundation, and a radio show I undertook with Michael Slate, and below, bringing the story more up to date, I’m posting below the video of the vigil outside the White House, featuring Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), Close Guantánamo, CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Defending Rights & Dissent, Justice for Muslims Collective, September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Witness Against Torture and the World Can’t Wait.

As ever, Witness Against Torture took the lead on actions across the capital during the week before the anniversary, while they were staying a local church and fasting, and their reports can be found here, here, here and here. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m six days into my annual trip to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, on and around the 17th anniversary of its opening (on January 11), and while it would be foolish to suggest, in any sense, that there is going to be any sort of movement on Guantánamo from the execrable Donald Trump, it’s certainly noticeable that, for the first time for three years, there is a real energy in the movement to finally get Guantánamo closed.

Three years ago, there was an energy to the efforts to get Barack Obama to close Guantánamo before he left office (which didn’t work, but did lead to him reducing the prison’s population to just 41 men), but two years ago we were caught in a dreadful limbo between the end of Obama and the start of Trump, and last year everyone seemed pretty crushed by the grim realities of Trump’s first year in office.

In part, this is just one aspect of what looks to be a growing resistance to Donald Trump on numerous fronts, and of course it’s not insignificant that I arrived. on Monday evening, during Trump’s petulant government shutdown, in which, to pursue his vile racist obsession with a wildly expensive expansion of the wall between the US and Mexico, he has shut down the salaries of millions of Americans who work for the government. At the time of writing, I’m glad to note, the effects of the shutdown seem to be damaging him in terms of his popularity. Read the rest of this entry »

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

It’s a year since I last encouraged you to write to the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, to mark their first year of imprisonment under Donald Trump, and I’m asking you to do so again, to let them know that they have not been entirely forgotten.

I’ve been encouraging opponents of Guantánamo to write to the prisoners on a regular basis since June 2010, when I was first prompted to do so by two Muslim activist friends in the UK, who had initiated a project to get people to write to the prisoners still held at that time — 186 in total.

I repeated the letter-writing project in June 2011, and then did so again every six months or so until July 2015, with two further calls in 2016, the last being in the dying weeks of the Obama presidency. Read the rest of this entry »

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I wrote the following article (as “Close Guantánamo Events Marking the 17th Anniversary of the Opening of Guantánamo”) 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 2019 began, the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay marked a shameful milestone. January 1 was the 6,200th day of operations at the prison, and we marked the occasion with the latest stage of our ongoing photo campaign, in which supporters take photos with posters showing how long Guantánamo has been open and urging Donald Trump to close it, based on our Gitmo Clock project, which counts in real time how long the prison has been open.

In seven days’ time, the prison will reach another appalling milestone: the 17th anniversary of its opening. This is on January 11, and to mark the occasion Close Guantánamo’s co-founders, the Washington, D.C.-based attorney Tom Wilner and the London-based journalist Andy Worthington (making his 9th annual visit for protest and events on and around the anniversary) will be taking part in a panel discussion at the New America think-tank, and will also be part of an annual vigil outside the White House organized by and attended by representatives of a dozen rights groups. Andy is also discussing Guantánamo in New York, two days after the anniversary, and both Andy and Tom are available for media interviews, and for further events, throughout the duration of Andy’s visit, from January 7-17.

Details of the events are below: Read the rest of this entry »

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Canada, contrasting itself with its neighbor to the south, the United States, likes to present itself as a beacon of justice and fairness, and yet, when to comes to the high-profile case of its citizen Omar Khadr, who was held at Guantánamo for nearly ten years, the Canadian government’s behavior has been almost unremittingly appalling.

Khadr was a child — just 15 years old — when, gravely wounded, he was seized by US forces in July 2002 after a firefight in Afghanistan, where he had been taken by his father. However, instead of treating him as a child who was not responsible for his own actions, and rehabilitating him, rather than punishing him, according to the terms of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflicts, which entered into force on February 12, 2002, and to which both the US and Canada are signatories, the US treated him appallingly, and, when Canadian agents were sent to Guantánamo to interview him, they failed to uphold his rights as a Canadian citizen.

The Canadian Supreme Court eventually delivered a powerful ruling regarding the violation of his rights, and, under Justin Trudeau, the government finally made amends for its behavior, paying him $10.5m in Canadian dollars (about $9m in US currency) in July 2017, following similar payments to other victims of Canada’s shameful post-9/11 behavior — a number of Canadian citizens of Syrian origin who were tortured in Syria (and in one case, that of Maher Arar, kidnapped in the US first, and then sent to Syria for torture) with the full collusion of the Canadian authorities. Read the rest of this entry »

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On December 9, I published an article marking the 4th anniversary of the publication of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, a five-year, $40 million project that demonstrated that torture was “not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees”, that the interrogations “were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others,” that the CIA made “inaccurate claims” about the “effectiveness” of the programme in an attempt to justify it and that it “led to friction with other agencies that endangered national security, as well as providing false statements that led to costly and worthless wild goose chases,” as I explained in an article at the time for Al-Jazeera.

With peoples’ minds still, hopefully, focused on questions of accountability, I also wanted to flag up that December 11 marked the 10th anniversary of an earlier report, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s ‘Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody,’ released on December 11, 2008, that, rather than focusing on the CIA, specifically exposed wrongdoing at the highest levels of the Bush administration.

The bipartisan report, issued by the committee’s chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, and its senior Republican, Sen. John McCain, runs to 232 pages, with a 29-page executive summary, and was based on a two-year investigation. In the course of its investigations the committee “reviewed more than 200,000 pages of classified and unclassified documents, including detention and interrogation policies, memoranda, electronic communications, training manuals, and the results of previous investigations into detainee abuse.” The committee also “interviewed over 70 individuals in connection with its inquiry,” mostly DoD, but also DoJ and FBI, “issued two subpoenas and held two hearings to take testimony from subpoenaed witnesses,” sent “written questions to more than 200 individuals,” and also “held public hearings on June 17, 2008 and September 25, 2008,” the transcripts of which, running to 380 pages, can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

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. 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.

Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we are saddened to hear of the death, at the age of 94, of Judge John J. Gibbons, who was one of the signatories to our initial mission statement when we first launched “Close Guantánamo” on January 11, 2012, the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison. Appointed in 1970 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, by Richard Nixon, he served on that court for 20 years, the last three as Chief Judge. While at the court, he authored more than 800 opinions.

When he left the bench, Judge Gibbons became a Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law in New Jersey, and also rejoined the firm he had been part of prior to becoming a judge, which become known as Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione in 1997, and then Gibbons P.C. in 2007.

Although he was a Republican, and, as Chris Hedges noted in a New York Times profile in February 2004, “his politics tend[ed] to veer to the conservative,” he was also “at once an insider and an outsider,” something of a “gadfly” at his largely corporate firm, where he was “one of the state’s leading crusaders against the death penalty.” He had, he told Hedges, “always been outraged by the use of the death penalty,” which was why his firm “filed ‘friend of the court’ briefs in almost every death penalty case in New Jersey.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Dear friends and supporters, and any engaged passers-by,

It’s nearly 13 years since I started working full-time as an independent journalist researching and writing about Guantánamo, and working to get the prison closed down. In that time, I’ve been employed by various media and human rights organizations, and have also been fortunate to have the support of a few prominent human rights-supporting individuals, but I have also become — most significantly, I think — a reader-funded journalist, activist and creator.

Over the years, there have been times when Guantánamo has slipped off the radar — for nearly three years under President Obama, between 2010 and 2013, when Congress conspired to make it difficult for him to release prisoners, and he responded by sitting on his hands rathe than spending politics capital overcoming lawmakers’ obstruction, and, of course, in the nearly two years since Donald Trump became president.

Because Trump has effectively sealed the prison shut, refusing to release anyone, it has become increasingly difficult to keep Guantánamo in the public eye, although I have been doing my best to keep focusing on it. I’m currently working on profiles of the remaining 40 prisoners, in the run-up to the 17th anniversary of the opening of the prison, on January 11, when I will, as usual, be visiting the US to campaign for the prison’s closure — a visit for which your support will be very helpful — and I’m also looking into finding a way to focus on the rights of former prisoners, many of whom have ended up in extremely vulnerable positions because Donald Trump closed down the US government office that dealt with re-settlements, and monitored prisoners after their release. Read the rest of this entry »