In an important op-ed for the Detroit Free Press, Maj. Gen. Mike Lehnert of the Marines, the first commander of Guantánamo, has called for the closure of the prison. Maj. Gen. Lehnert built the open air cages of Camp X-Ray, the “war on terror” prison’s first incarnation, in just four days prior to the arrival of the first prisoners on January 11, 2002.

As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, Lehnert initially bought into the hyperbole and propaganda about the prisoners, stating, soon after the prison opened, “These represent the worst elements of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We asked for the worst guys first.” However, he soon changed his mind. In early February 2002, he provided an important insight into how, contrary to what senior Bush administration officials were saying in public, the uncomfortable truth was they they had no idea who most of the prisoners were. “A large number claim to be Taliban, a smaller number we have been able to confirm as al-Qaeda, and a rather large number in the middle we have not been able to determine their status,” he said, adding, “Many of the detainees are not forthcoming. Many have been interviewed as many as four times, each time providing a different name and different information.”

Unfortunately, the Bush administration responded not by acknowledging that it had, with a handful of exceptions, bought and rounded up civilians and low-level Taliban conscripts, but by aggressively interrogating the men over many years and, in many cases, introducing a torture program involving prolonged sleep deprivation, isolation, humiliation, the use of loud music and noise, and the exploitation of phobias. This produced copious amounts of information, as was revealed when WikiLeaks released classified military files relating to the prisoners in April 2011, but much of it was fundamentally unreliable. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, I was delighted to talk to Susan Modaress, for the show “Inside Out” on Press TV. Susan interviewed me while I was in New York City in January 2011, for protests on the ninth anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, which are available here.

The 22-minute show, “Is Guantánamo Forever?” (available below via YouTube) centred on a Skype interview with me and an interview with Karen Greenberg, the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s School of Law, and I hope you have time to watch it.

Susan and I began by discussing the hunger strike — how it began, and why the 166 men still held are in such despair that they have been refusing food for over five months and are risking their lives.

Their despair, of course, is because 86 of them were cleared for release three and a half years ago by the inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force, but are still held, and the 80 others were either recommended for trials that have largely failed to materialize, or were recommended for indefinite detention without charge or trial, on the basis that they were too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence exists to put them on trial.

Read the rest of this entry »