Please support my work! 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.

Yesterday (June 28), three members of Veterans for Peace — the US military veterans’ organization founded in 1985 and committed to building “a culture of peace” — interrupted the Senate confirmation hearing for Steven G. Bradbury, nominated by Donald Trump as general counsel for the Commerce, Science and Transportation Department, and were subsequently arrested. Videos are available here and here,

The three VFP members — Tarak Kauff, Ken Ashe and Ellen Barfield — were protesting about Bradbury’s role as one of the authors of the notorious “torture memos” under George W. Bush, and they were not alone. As the New York Times explained, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, told Bradbury at the hearing, “You lacked the judgment to stand up and say what is morally right when pressured by the president of the United States, and I’m afraid you would do so again.” She then “wagged her finger at Mr. Bradbury and accused him of having a dangerous ‘rubber stamp’ mentality,” and said, “I cannot oppose this nomination strongly enough.”

For my call for Steven Bradbury to be prosecuted — along with other senior Bush administration officials and lawyers — listen to my song ‘81 Million Dollars,’ performed with my band The Four Fathers.

The “torture memos” were written and approved in the Office of Legal Counsel (the branch of the Justice Department that is supposed to provide impartial advice to the executive branch), and the first examples were written by law professor John Yoo, and approved by Yoo’s boss, Jay S. Bybee. The memos sought to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA on Abu Zubaydah, seized in Pakistan in March 2002 and regarded as a “high-value detainee,” and approved a list of techniques that included waterboarding, an ancient torture technique that involves controlled drowning. 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 and related issues over the first two months of the Trump administration.

In shocking news from the Trump administration regarding Guantánamo, the New York Times has obtained a new draft executive order, “Protecting America Through Lawful Detention of Terrorist and Other Designated Enemy Elements,” directing the Pentagon to bring Islamic State prisoners to Guantánamo.

Two weeks ago, the Times published a leaked draft executive order, “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants” (which I wrote about here), calling for two executive orders issued by President Obama when he first took office in January 2009 to be revoked — one banning the CIA’s use of “black sites” and torture techniques, and the other ordering the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. The draft order also called for new prisoners to be sent to Guantánamo, and for “any existing transfer efforts” to be suspended “pending a new review.”

After a huge outcry regarding the torture proposals, these were dropped from a revised order that Charlie Savage was told about, which he discussed in an article on February 4 — and which I mentioned yesterday in an article for the Close Guantánamo campaign looking primarily at opposition to the draft executive order from senior Democrats and rights groups.

Now, however, with the leaking of the new draft executive order, it has become clear that, although Trump has given up on his torture plans, he is close to telling defence secretary James Mattis to bring Islamic State prisoners to Guantánamo, “despite warnings from national security officials and legal scholars that doing so risks undermining the effort to combat the group,” as Charlie Savage described it. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 with 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 has been almost three weeks now since President Obama announced that five Taliban prisoners had been released from Guantánamo in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan, but the fallout from that prisoner exchange continues to cast a shadow over grown-up discussions about why the prison must be closed, and why every day that it remains open is a profound shame.

Below is an op-ed by Tom Wilner, the co-founder of the  “Close Guantánamo” campaign, which was recently published on the Warscapes website, following up on articles by Andy Worthington, the other co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, on PolicyMic, here and for Al-Jazeera.

The response to the prisoner exchange — which has been cynical, opportunistic and disgraceful — is well exposed by Tom in his article, in which he reminds readers of the limits of the detention powers used at Guantánamo (the Authorization for Use of Military Force), with particular reference to the Supreme Court’s ruling about detention powers, back in June 2004, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor ruled that the US “may detain, for the duration of these hostilities, individuals legitimately determined to be Taliban combatants who ‘engaged in an armed conflict against the United States.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we were reminded, via the Miami Herald, of how Guantánamo is not on the agenda for the forthcoming Presidential election. In 2008, President Obama was preparing to order the prison’s closure, but his executive order in January 2009, promising to close it within a year, failed to lead to the prison’s closure, and this time around the Democrats’ official message is more nuanced. “We are substantially reducing the population at Guantánamo Bay without adding to it,” their official literature proclaims, adding, “And we remain committed to working with all branches of government to close the prison altogether because it is inconsistent with our national security interests and our values.”

Mitt Romney has also not spoken about Guantánamo on the campaign trail, although in 2007, while he was unsuccessfully seeking the Republican nomination, he said, during a debate on Fox News, that “we ought to double Guantánamo.”

Sadly, although Guantánamo has dropped off the radar, despite being a permanent  source of shame for all Americans who respect the rule of law, torture, it seems, is back as a topic of discussion. Read the rest of this entry »