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20 years ago today, on April 20, 2006, a document was released by the Pentagon that changed my life, launching me on what has become the defining struggle (or jihad, in Arabic) of my time here on earth as an independent journalist and human rights activist: exposing the horrific injustice of the US’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, telling the stories of the 779 men — and boys — held there by the US military, and calling for the prison’s closure.

The document in question was a list of 558 prisoners held at Guantánamo at the time (see here or here), unwillingly released by the Pentagon through Freedom of Information legislation.

It was the first ever list of prisoners released by the US government, which, for four years and three months, since Guantánamo first opened on January 11, 2002 — to hold prisoners seized in connection with the global “war on terror” declared by the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — had sought to shroud the prison and those held there in a veil of the utmost secrecy, behind which it could completely disregard all international and domestic laws and treaties concerning the treatment of those deprived of their liberty.

With the release of this document, it was suddenly possible, by cross-referencing with other documents unwillingly released by the Pentagon, and other available reports, to tell the stories of those held at Guantánamo, and to fatally puncture the Bush administration’s lies that those held were “the worst of the worst”, “terrorists” who were “seized on the battlefield”, and who were all hell-bent on inflicting the maximum amount of damage imaginable on the so-called “Land of the Free.”

Inventing a category of prisoner without any rights whatsoever

For those regarded as having committed crimes or for those detained in wartime, only two courses of action are legally applicable for depriving people of their liberty in countries that, like the US, claim to respect the rule of law. Those detained are either charged with a crime, and swiftly put on trial, or are held as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.

Under George W. Bush, however, the US government decided that those held at Guantánamo were “unlawful enemy combatants”, who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and who, fundamentally, had no rights whatsoever.

For the very small number of men who were to be charged with crimes relating to terrorism, the venue chosen for their intended prosecution was not the federal courts on the US mainland, but at Guantánamo itself, in military commission trials that had been unwisely dredged up from past military conflicts, and which, shockingly, were conceived, initially, as a method for swiftly executing alleged “terrorists” after brief capital trials in which information derived through the use of torture would be allowed.

For the first two and half years of their imprisonment, the anonymous victims of the “war on terror” were so thoroughly cut off from the world that, when it came to Guantánamo, the only valid comparison for the US under George W. Bush was with a full-blown dictatorship.

However, most of the US, from its politicians to its mainstream media and far too many of its citizens, didn’t care, as a permanent state of grief, fear and vengeance was cultivated and maintained by the government, by Congress and by the mainstream media.

Although brave lawyers began challenging Bush’s dictatorial regime almost immediately, it wasn’t until June 2004 that the Supreme Court ruled on a case, Rasul v. Bush, named after a British prisoner, Shafiq Rasul, that had been making its way through the courts for the previous two years.

The prisoners briefly secure habeas corpus rights

In Rasul, the Supreme Court ruled that, because the prisoners had no way of challenging the basis of their imprisonment, even if they declared that they were completely innocent and had been seized by mistake, they had habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to challenge the government’s supposed evidence against them before an impartial judge.

It was a sign of how grotesquely the Bush administration had deliberately blurred the distinctions between alleged criminal behavior and the actions of foot soldiers in wartime that this ruling was required. Normally, there was no need to grant habeas corpus rights to people seized in wartime, because the Geneva Conventions applied, allowing them to be held unmolested until the end of hostilities. In the “war on terror”, however, the government had compelled the Court to act by failing to review the prisoners’ cases close to the time of place and capture, to ascertain whether or not they were combatants or civilians seized by mistake.

Historically, this was achieved by convening “competent tribunals” under the Geneva Conventions, at which those who claimed to be civilians caught by mistake could call witnesses to verify their claims. In the first Gulf War, around 1,200 “competent tribunals” were held, and, in around three-quarters of the cases, the US military recognized that they had made mistakes, and the wrongly-detained civilians were released. At Guantánamo, in contrast, the position taken by the Bush administration, primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington, was that no mistakes were made, and that everyone detained was an “unlawful enemy combatant”, without any right to have those evidence-free assertions reviewed.

Crucially, the ruling in Rasul v. Bush allowed attorneys into Guantánamo to begin representing the men held on a pro bono basis, but while the arrival of lawyers brought the most blatant torture and abuse at the prison to an end, which had relied on the veil of total secrecy to keep it hidden, most of the prisoners who accepted representation by US attorneys, having overcome their initial concerns that they were secretly working for the government, didn’t have their cases publicized, to prevent any contamination of their planned hearings, and also to prevent what might otherwise have been a torrent of black propaganda emanating from the Bush administration and lapped up by compliant media.

In those early years, the only reports that emerged from Guantánamo were via the accounts of released prisoners, initially in brief comments made largely by released Afghan and Pakistani prisoners, who made up the bulk of the 200 or so prisoners released from 2002 to 2004, and particularly, from 2004 onwards, when European citizens were freed after belated pressure was exerted by their home governments, and when they began relating their accounts to generally sympathetic mainstream media outlets with a wide reach.

Convening unfair tribunals at Guantánamo

However, despite the importance of Rasul, Congress was subsequently prevailed upon by the Bush administration to pass laws aimed at stripping the prisoners of their newly-granted habeas rights, and the Bush administration, in a further snub to the Supreme Court, convened administrative military tribunals at Guantánamo — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) and, later, the Administrative Review Boards (ARBs) — which were designed not to provide justice, but, shamefully, to rubber-stamp their designation, on capture, as “unlawful enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely without rights, continuing the prison’s fundamental lawlessness.

Fundamentally, the CSRTs and ARBs echoed the “competent tribunals” that should have taken place when the prisoners were first seized, but they were deliberately worthless in the context of Guantánamo, far from the time and place of capture, when witnesses were unobtainable.

Although I had been aware of the disturbing lawlessness of Guantánamo from the day it opened, I spent the first four years of its existence working in another field entirely: writing two books, Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield (both still in print) about the contested landscape of Stonehenge, the great sun temple in southern England, the anarchic pagan free festivals that flourished there every summer from 1974 to 1984, and the vile police assault on those seeking to make their way to Stonehenge in 1985, at what has become known as the Battle of the Beanfield.

Because this research exposed me to profound questions about the nature and extent of civil liberties and human rights, and, eventually, the rule of law, as the UK’s highest court ruled that a military-style exclusion zone imposed at Stonehenge every summer for 15 years was illegal, paving the way for public access on the summer solstice to be restored, everything was in place for me to end the summer of 2005, which I had spent in idyllic circumstances, traveling with my family from festival to festival in the English countryside to promote my Beanfield book, by becoming ensnared in the far graver story of Guantánamo.

After attending a law event discussing the British prisoners still held in September 2005, I became appalled by the Bush administration’s continuing secrecy about who it was holding at the prison, and began conducting detailed research on the internet, also drawing on two speculative lists of the prisoners held, compiled by the British NGO Cageprisoners (now CAGE International) and the Washington Post.

The significance of the release of the prisoner list

It was not until March 2006, however, that the US’s obsessive secrecy first began to be decisively prised open publicly. In response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Associated Press, the Pentagon was obliged to release, on March 3, 2006, over 5,000 pages of documents from Guantánamo; primarily, unclassified allegations against the prisoners, and transcripts from their CSRTs, with the names of a number of the prisoners included. An earlier lawsuit has led to the release of 2,000 pages of documents, in May 2005, although all identifying information had been redacted.

Although some of those in the files released in March 2006 were identified by their names, rather than just their prison numbers (their ISNs, or Internment Serial Numbers), it was not until the list of 558 prisoners was released on April 20, 2006, providing the names and nationalities of the 558 prisoners who had gone through the CSRT process, and the first round of the subsequent ARB process, that it was possible for investigative journalists and researchers to finally establish who the prisoners dismissed by Donald Rumsfeld as “the worst of the worst” really were, through cross-referencing the CSRT documents and unclassified allegations with the names on the prisoner list.

I immediately began working around the clock to create plausible biographies of the prisoners, based on whatever glimpses emerged of them through the transcripts of the tribunals, and to establish the important context of where and when they were seized, which was essential in ascertaining whether or not they had been foot soldiers with the Taliban, for example, or civilians seized by mistake. At no point, crucially, was it apparent that any more than a handful of these individuals had any meaningful association with Al-Qaeda or any other group connected to any kind of terrorism.

A second list, released on May 15, 2006 (see here and here), provided even more context — the names, nationalities and dates of birth of all 759 prisoners held from the date the prison opened. As I continued my research, I kept expecting to hear of similar efforts undertaken by mainstream media outlets or NGOs, but it turned out that I was alone, and became the sole independent custodian of the prisoners’ stories.

Writing The Guantánamo Files

I pitched a proposal for a book to the tenacious left-wing publisher Pluto Press, which was accepted, and then spent over a year engaged in an obsessive quest for the truth, which resulted in my book The Guantánamo Files, accurately described as “the first book to tell the story of every man trapped in Guantánamo”, which I submitted in May 2007, and which was published four months later.

Crucially, what my research revealed was that the majority of the prisoners were not “seized on the battlefield”, as the US alleged, but had been seized elsewhere, confirming reports that most had been handed over by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, and that substantial bounty payments were involved.

I was able to establish that a number of men had been seized in Afghanistan in the early months of the US-led invasion, and that most of these men had either survived a massacre in a prison, or massacres in containers as they were transported from one location to another. I was also able to establish that the largest group of prisoners — hundreds in total — had not been seized in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan, after crossing from Afghanistan in December 2001.

These men were all portrayed as Al-Qaeda fighters who had been involved in the Battle of Tora Bora, but in all likelihood they consisted of a mix of foot soldiers, missionaries, aid workers and economic migrants, mainly from Europe and the Middle East, who had been attracted by the notion that the Taliban had created a “pure Islamic state” in Afghanistan, or who had simply been drawn by its affordability, compared to their home countries or their experiences as marginalized migrants in Europe.

I also established that numerous prisoners, who had not even set foot in Afghanistan, had been seized in house raids in Pakistan, largely between January and July 2002, which were noteworthy for the general incompetence of the military intelligence involved, and that around 40 men had been transferred to Guantánamo after spending time in the CIA’s network of “black site” torture prisons, or in proxy prisons operated by US allies in the Middle East.

The largest group of prisoners sent to Guantánamo were Afghans — many reluctant Taliban conscripts, or men betrayed by their rivals in Afghanistan itself — who continued to be sent to Guantánamo in significant numbers until November 2003, when their transfers ceased, and Bagram prison in Afghanistan took over as the primary prison for Afghans and others seized during the US’s ongoing occupation.

A group of ten or so “medium-value detainees” arrived from the CIA “black sites” in September 2004, while 14 more men, the so-called “high-value detainees”, arrived from the CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and six more in 2007 and 2008.

The transfer in September 2006 marked the first time that it was feasible to suggest that at least some of these men fitted the almost non-existent description of those held at Guantánamo being anyone at all who could meaningfully be described as having been involved in Al-Qaeda and acts of international terrorism, including the 9/11 attacks.

Locating the time and location of the prisoners’ capture helped me to interpret which of the competing narratives exposed in the US government’s files — the US’s own accounts, and those of the prisoners themselves — was the most credible, and I believe that the passage of time has confirmed most of my assessments that, to put it bluntly, almost no one held at Guantánamo had any significant involvement with terrorism, and that they were, instead, overwhelmingly either insignificant foot soldiers, or civilians seized by mistake.

After I submitted the manuscript of The Guantánamo Files to Pluto Press, I almost immediately began writing regularly about Guantánamo on my website, telling stories untold in the mainstream media, or following up on mainstream media reporting that provided information, but lacked the crucial context of always pointing out that the very basis of Guantánamo, and everything to do with it, represented the most colossal failure imaginable of international law and of basic human standards of decency.

Please support my work if you can

I’ll post another article soon telling the story of my relentless independent journalism and activism over the last 19 years, but for now, if you’ve enjoyed the account above, please do consider, if you can, making a donation to support my work.

Although I have worked, at various times, with the UN, WikiLeaks, Cageprisoners (now CAGE International), Reprieve, the Center for Constitutional Rights and members of the European Parliament, and have written articles for the New York Times, the Guardian and Al Jazeera, I have undertaken most of my work over these two defining decades of my life — over 2,600 articles about Guantánamo, numerous personal appearances and media appearances, as well as specific campaigns and activism — on the basis that it needed doing, and that, as a truly independent writer, largely excluded from the mainstream media, with its inbuilt biases, or its often paralyzing obsession with “objectivity”, I would need to be reliant on the financial support of my readers to enable me to continue this work.

If you can help out at all, you can take out a paid subscription to my Substack, which I established 18 months ago, and which also means that you’ll be notified about all my work in your inbox, for $80 a year, or $8 a month, or you can donate any amount you wish to make via PayPal, with an option of making regular monthly payments, or via Stripe, where I recently set up an account.

Any financial support you can provide will be very greatly appreciated.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), 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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage 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 and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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

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.

 

Three weeks ago, I began a new Guantánamo project, telling the stories of the 16 men who have been approved for release from the prison, in an effort to humanize them, to remind the world of their existence, and to highlight the disgracefully long amount of time that they have been held since being approved for release.

I’m alternating publication of the articles here and on the Close Guantánamo website, tying them in to noteworthy dates relating to how long they have been held since the US authorities first decided that they no longer wanted to hold them. The first article focused on the case of Uthman Abd Al-Rahim Muhammad Uthman, a Yemeni who, on February 7, had been held for 1,000 days since being approved for release, and the second focused on Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah, another Yemeni, who, on February 11, had been held for 1,200 days since being approved for release. For the fourth article, about Abdulsalam Al-Hela and Sharqawi Al-Hajj, see here.

The reason these men have been held for so long without being freed is, sadly, because the decisions taken to release them — via Periodic Review Boards, a parole-type review process established by President Obama in 2013 — were purely administrative, meaning that the US government has no legal obligation to free them, and they cannot, for example, appeal to a judge to order their release if, as has become sadly apparent, the government has failed to prioritize their release.

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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.

On Monday June 26, 7,837 days since the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened, and on the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the Special Procedures of the UN Human Rights Council (“independent human rights experts with mandates to report and advise on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective”) issued a devastatingly critical report about systemic, historic and ongoing human rights abuses at the prison, based on the first ever visit by a Special Rapporteur — Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, who visited the prison in February.

At the time of her visit, just 34 men were held at the prison (a number now reduced to 30), out of the 779 men and boys who have been held by the US military throughout the prison’s long history, and, as the Special Rapporteur admitted, she agreed with every “detainee or former detainee,” who, “[i]n every meeting she held” with them, told her, “with great regret,” that she had arrived “too late.”

However, it is crucial to understand that the lateness of the visit was not through a lack of effort on the part of the UN; rather, it was a result of a persistent lack of cooperation by the US authorities — part of a pattern of obstruction, secrecy and surveillance that prevented any UN visit because the authorities failed to comply with the Terms of Reference for Country Visits by Special Procedure Mandate Holders, which require “[c]onfidential and unsupervised contact with witnesses and other private persons, including persons deprived of their liberty.”

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In the sixteen years and eight months since I began working on Guantánamo on a full-time basis, I’ve built up an unprecedented archive of nearly 2,500 articles telling the stories of men held there, following their efforts to secure release from the prison, and, in the cases of all but the 36 men still held, writing about their release, and, in some cases, their lives afterwards.

In 2009, I first compiled a definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, listing all the men (and boys) held at the prison, providing references to where I told their stories in my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007, and also providing links to all my articles mentioning them. I updated the list in 2010 (twice), 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2018, and have now updated it for the eighth time, adding links to the articles I’ve written over the last four years.

I hope this is of interest, and you can find the six articles here: Part 1 (ISN prisoner numbers 1-133), Part 2 (134-268), Part 3 (269-496), Part 4 (497-661), Part 5 (662-928) and Part 6 (929-10029).

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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 an important ruling in the District Court in Washington, D.C. last week, Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama nominee, granted the habeas corpus petition of Asadullah Haroon Gul, an Afghan prisoner held at Guantánamo without charge or trial since June 2007, and identified by the US authorities simply as Haroon al-Afghani.

The ruling is significant because it is the first time since July 2010 that a judge has granted a Guantánamo prisoner’s habeas corpus petition on the basis that his detention is unlawful. After the Supreme Court granted the Guantánamo prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, in Boumediene v. Bush, in June 2008, there followed a two-year period that was the only time in Guantánamo’s history that the courts were able to objectively assess the basis of the prisoners’ detention, and in 38 cases judges ruled that the government had failed to establish that they had any meaningful connection to either Al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

By 2010, however, politically motivated appeals court judges had passed a number of rulings that gutted habeas corpus of all meaning for the Guantánamo prisoners. The last man freed after having his habeas corpus petition granted was Mohammed Hassen (aka Mohammed Hassan Odaini), a Yemeni who was freed in July 2010 after having his habeas petition granted in May 2010. Two other prisoners had their habeas petitions granted in July 2010, but they were amongst the six men whose successful petitions were subsequently overturned by the court of appeals, and, from July 2010 until October 2011, eleven men had their habeas petitions denied, until they, and their lawyers, gave up. Several efforts were made in the following years to interest the Supreme Court in taking back control of Guantánamo detainee issues, and to break through the obstacles raised by the court of appeals, but all, sadly, were in vain.

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I wrote the following article (as “The Ongoing Legal Struggles to Secure Justice for the Guantánamo Prisoners Under President Biden”) 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 the nineteen unforgivably long years since the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay was first established, lawyers have worked tirelessly to challenge and overturn the Bush administration’s outrageous contention that everyone who ended up at Guantánamo was an “enemy combatant” with no rights whatsoever, who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial.

There have been victories along the way, but the sad truth is that Guantánamo’s fundamental lawlessness remains intact to this day. Since 2010, only one prisoner has been freed because of the actions of lawyers and the US courts (a Sudanese man whose mental health issues persuaded the Justice Department, in this one instance only, not to challenge his habeas corpus petition), and, as the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency showed, if the president doesn’t want anyone released from Guantánamo, no legal avenue exists to compel him to do otherwise.

The lawyers’ great legal victories for the Guantánamo prisoners came in the Supreme Court in what now seems to be the distant, long-lost past. In June 2004, in Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruled that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights; in other words, the right to have the evidence against them objectively assessed by a judge. That ruling allowed lawyers into the prison to begin to represent the men held, breaking the veil of secrecy that had allowed abusive conditions to thrive, but Congress then intervened to block the habeas legislation, and it was not until June 2008 that the Supreme Court, revisiting Guantánamo, ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that Congress had acted unconstitutionally, and affirmed that the prisoners had constitutionally guaranteed habeas rights.

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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.

 

As we await further information from the Biden administration about its planned review of Guantánamo, it’s reassuring to see that the Afghan government has submitted an amicus brief in a US court as part of efforts to secure the release and repatriation of Asadullah Haroon Gul, one of the last two Afghans in Guantánamo, after 14 years of imprisonment at Guantánamo without charge or trial, in which, for the first nine years, he didn’t even have representation by a lawyer.

I have followed Gul’s story since he arrived at Guantánamo from Afghanistan in June 2007, as one of the last prisoners to be sent to the prison. He had allegedly been involved with Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIA, also identified as HIG), a group led by the Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who had briefly been aligned with al-Qaeda after the US-led invasion in October 2001, but the US authorities had never regarded him as significant, because he is the only Guantánamo prisoner not to have been assigned a Guantánamo Internment Serial Number (ISN). Instead, his prisoner serial number (3148) is from Bagram. This is significant because a Guantánamo number is required to be eligible for an administrative review at Guantánamo (a Combatant Status Review Tribunal), which is required if a prisoner is to be charged.

Even more significant is the fact that, even if Gul was involved with HIA, Hekmatyar no longer has any connection to al-Qaeda, and HIA “ceased all hostilities with the United States” in 2016, following a peace agreement in 2016 between HIA and the Afghan government, as the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs explains in the brief, adding that “[d]etainees who are not a member of Al Qaida or the Taliban must be released if their organization is no longer engaged in hostilities with the United States.” In August, Hekmatyar’s return to Afghan political life was confirmed when he was appointed to the Afghan government’s High Council for National Reconciliation.

As the Ministry also points out, “Members of the United States Government have recognized this end to hostilities by negotiating with members of HIA. Thus, Haroon, a member of HIA, should be released.”

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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.

 

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 the long and dispiriting story of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, where, in defiance of its purported values, the US is holding men indefinitely without charge or trial, the role of Congress is not always well understood.

Under George W. Bush, lawmakers were largely compliant with the shameful innovations introduced after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, passing the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the week after the attacks, which allowed the president to pursue anyone that he felt was associated with Al-Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces, and to imprison them at the Guantánamo prison, which was deliberately established on the US naval base in Cuba to be beyond the reach of the US courts.

From the beginning, the men — and boys — held there were held without rights, and although long legal struggles led to them eventually securing habeas corpus rights, Congress fought back. However, when their habeas rights were eventually gutted of all meaning, the responsibility lay with ideologically malignant appeals court judges rather than Congress.

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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.

 

Disturbing news from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), who report that one of their Guantánamo clients, Sharqawi al-Hajj, “stated on a recent call with his attorney that he wanted to take his own life.” CCR described this, in a press release, as “a first” in CCR’s long representation of al-Hajj, adding that their attorneys have responded to it “with the utmost seriousness.”

As they further explain, “His suicidal statements follow a steady and observable deterioration of his physical and mental health that his legal team has been raising the alarm about for two years. They are monitoring his condition as best they can, and will provide any further information as soon as they are able.”

In an eloquent statement, CCR’s lawyers said, “When things are in a state of perpetual crisis, as they seem all around today, it is easy to lose sight of just how extreme a situation is, and grow numb to it. We have lost sight of just how extreme the situation in the Guantánamo prison is. We have grown numb to it.”

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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.

Anyone who has been following the alleged legal basis for the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of prisoners at Guantánamo should be encouraged by a ruling on June 21, 2019 by a three-judge panel — consisting of Judges Patricia A. Millett, Cornelia T. L. Pillard, and Harry T. Edwards — in the D.C. Circuit Court (the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia) in Qassim v. Trump, a case involving Khalid Qassim, a 41-year old Yemeni citizen who has been held at Guantánamo without charge or trial for over 17 years.

Close Guantánamo’s co-founder Tom Wilner argued the case before the court, and, as he explains, the court “reversed an eight-year rule that has prevented Guantánamo detainees from seeing and rebutting the evidence purportedly justifying their detentions,” as part of a ruling in which the judges granted Qassim’s request to reverse the District Court’s denial of his petition for habeas corpus.

To give some necessary perspective to the significance of the ruling, it is important to understand that, for most of Guantánamo’s history, the law has failed to offer them adequate protections against executive overreach. In a glaring demonstration of arrogant folly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration decided that anyone who ended up in US custody would be treated neither as a criminal (to be charged and put on trial), nor as a prisoner of war protected by the Geneva Conventions, who could be held unmolested until the end of hostilities. Instead, the prisoners were designated as “unlawful enemy combatants”; essentially, human beings without any rights whatsoever.

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