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Anyone paying close attention to the prison at Guantánamo Bay will know that its continued existence, nearly 17 years after it first opened, is largely down to the success of some wildly inaccurate claims that were made about it when its malevolent business first began — claims that it held “the worst of the worst” terrorists, who were all captured on the battlefield.

In fact, as my research, and that of other researchers has shown, very few of the 779 men held by the US military at Guantánamo since the prison opened on January 11, 2002 can realistically be described as having had any meaningful involvement with al-Qaeda or the Taliban; perhaps just 3 percent, and certainly less than 5 percent. No one was captured on the battlefield, and the majority were either foot soldiers for the Taliban in an inter-Muslim civil war that predated 9/11, or civilians swept up in ill-advised dragnets. Many, if not most of those who ended up at Guantánamo were sold to the US by their Afghan and Pakistani allies for bounty payments, which averaged $5,000 a head, a huge amount of money in that part of the world.

Just 40 men are still held at Guantánamo, after George W. Bush released 532 men, and Barack Obama released 196. Nine men died, one was transferred to the US, to face a trial in which he was successfully prosecuted, and one more was reluctantly released by Donald Trump, or, rather, was transferred back to Saudi Arabia for ongoing imprisonment, as part of a plea deal negotiated in his military commission trial proceedings in 2014. Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo until the end of the year.

The Periodic Review Boards at Guantánamo, which have been reviewing the cases of all the men still held who are not approved for release or facing trials (currently, exactly half of the 60 men still held), have recently made public their decisions in two of the five remaining cases for which decisions had not already been taken. The review boards, which began in November 2013, consist of representatives of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, as well as the office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,  and are similar to parole boards, assessing whether prisoners show contrition for their alleged crimes, whether they can demonstrate that they do not hold any ill-will towards the US, and whether they can establish a credible scenario for a peaceful life after Guantánamo.

The decisions — to approve the ongoing imprisonment of two men, Guleed Hassan Ahmed and Hambali — mean that, of the 64 cases considered, 34 have ended with recommendations for release (and 21 of those men have been freed), while 27 have led to recommendations that the men in question should continue to be imprisoned without charge or trial — but with regular reviews of their cases continuing to take place, for which the men and their lawyers can continue to provide information that they think will help to secure a recommendation for the release. For further information, see my definitive Periodic Review Board list on the Close Guantánamo website.

This is a success rate for the prisoners of 56%, although there is, it should be noted, a distinct difference in the results of the PRBs based on the two types of prisoners put forward for the reviews. Read the rest of this entry »

The military commissions at Guantánamo, as I have been reporting for ten years, are a shamefully deficient excuse for justice, a system dreamt up in the heat of America’s post-9/11 sorrow, when hysteria and vengeance trumped common sense and a respect for the law, and it was decided, by senior Bush administration officials and their lawyers, that prisoners seized in the “war on terror” and subjected to torture should be tried in a system that allowed the use of information derived through the use of torture, and swiftly found guilty and executed.

Military prosecutors, however, soon turned against the system and pointedly resigned, and in 2006 the Supreme Court ruled the whole system illegal. Nevertheless, the Bush administration, with the enthusiastic support of Congress, revived the commissions in the fall of 2006, followed by further resignations (see here and here), and a third version of the commissions ill-advisedly emerged under President Obama in his first year in office (see here and here). The commissions have been tweaked to be less unjust, but they are still a Frankenstein’s Monster facsimile of a working trial system, full of so many holes that it is difficult for them to function at all, and at their heart is the specter of torture, which the government endlessly tries to hide, while the prisoners’ defence teams, of course, try constantly to expose it, as no fair trial can take place without it being discussed.

In recent years, my coverage of the commissions has been less thorough than it was between 2007 and the summer of 2014, largely because it seemed to me that the commissions were so broken and were going round and round in circles so pointlessly that it was no longer even worth trying to follow what was — or, more often, what wasn’t — happening. In one way, this was a fair reflection of the futility of the commissions’ efforts to secure anything resembling justice, but the more fundamental reality was that, however broken the proceedings may have been, pre-trial hearings were still taking place, however little they were being reported, which, one day, would constitute a damning indictment of America’s post-9/11 flight from justice and the law, and its embrace of torture and indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial. As a result, the commissions really ought not to be allowed to drop off the radar. Read the rest of this entry »

This week, Guleed Hassan Ahmed aka Gouled Hassan Dourad (ISN 10023), a Somali prisoner at Guantánamo — who arrived at the prison in September 2006, after being held in CIA “black sites” for two and a half years — became the 55th prisoner to face a Periodic Review Board. Set up in 2013, the PRBs are reviewing the cases of all the prisoners held at Guantánamo who are not facing trials (just ten of the remaining 76 prisoners) or who were not already approved for release by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in January 2009.

32 men have so far been approved for release via the PRBs (and eleven have been released), while 16 have had their ongoing imprisonment held, a 67% success rate for the prisoners, which rather demolishes the claims made by Obama’s task force that they were “too dangerous to release” or that they should be prosecuted.

Guleed Hassan Ahmed was born in April 1974, and is one of 16 “high-value detainees” who, as noted above, arrived at Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006. He was seized in Djibouti in March 2004, by Somalis working with the CIA, but little is known of his whereabouts for the next two and a half years until his arrival at Guantánamo, or, indeed, why he ended up at Guantánamo at all. I always wondered if someone in the Bush administration wanted to have someone connected to events in Somalia at Guantánamo, simply to see if new connections could be made. Read the rest of this entry »