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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.

Three weeks ago, a grave injustice took place at Guantánamo, when Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a 62- or 63-year old Iraqi citizen whose real name is Nashwan al-Tamir, and who is Guantánamo’s most profoundly disabled prisoner, was given the maximum sentence possible by a military jury at his sentencing for war crimes in the prison’s military court. The jury gave him a 30-year sentence, although, under a plea deal agreed in June 2022, that was reduced to ten years, meaning that he will not, apparently, be freed from the prison until June 2032.

The reason this is a problem is that al-Iraqi suffers from a chronic degenerative spinal disease, which has not been been dealt with adequately despite the seven surgical interventions he has received in the medical facilities at Guantánamo. Shamefully, prisoners are forbidden, through US law, from being transferred to to the US mainland to receive specialist medical treatment even though grave physical problems like al-Iraqi’s cannot be properly addressed in Guantánamo’s limited medical facilities. All of these problems were highlighted in a devastating 18-page opinion about al-Iraqi’s treatment, which was issued by number of UN Special Mandates on January 11, 2023, the 21st anniversary of the prison’s opening, and which I wrote about here.

The sentence seems particularly punitive because there is no guarantee that al-Iraqi will even survive until 2032, and it is certainly possible, if not probable that, if he does survive, he will by then be completely paralyzed. Two years ago, when the plea deal was announced (which I wrote about here), sentencing was delayed for two years to allow the US government “to find a sympathetic nation to receive him and provide him with lifelong medical care,” and also to hold him while he serves out the rest of his sentence, as Carol Rosenberg explained at the time for the New York Times, given that he cannot be repatriated because of the security situation in Iraq.

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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 recent months, an often-submerged story at Guantánamo — of aging torture victims with increasingly complex medical requirements, trapped in a broken justice system, and of the US government’s inability to care for them adequately — has surfaced though a number of reports that are finally shining a light on the darkest aspects of a malignant 21-year experiment that, throughout this whole time, has regularly trawled the darkest recesses of American depravity.

Over the years, those of us who have devoted our energies to getting the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed have tended to focus on getting prisoners never charged with a crime released, because, since the Bush years, when, largely without meeting much resistance, George W. Bush released two-thirds of the 779 men and boys rounded up so haphazardly in the years following the 9/11 attacks and the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, getting prisoners out of Guantánamo has increasingly resembled getting blood out of a stone.

Apart from a brief period from 2008 to 2010, when the law finally reached Guantánamo through habeas corpus (before cynical appeals court judges took it away again), getting out of Guantánamo has involved overcoming government inertia (for several years under Obama) or open hostility (under Trump), repeated administrative review processes characterized by extreme caution regarding prisoners never charged with a crime, and against whom the supposed evidence is, to say the least, flimsy (which led to over 60 men being accurately described by the media as “forever prisoners”), and many dozens of cases in which, when finally approved for release because of this fundamental lack of evidence, the men in question have had to wait (often for years) for new homes to be found for them in third countries.

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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.

Thanks to Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times for reporting on the latest news from Guantánamo about the troubling consequences of a Congressional ban on prisoners being taken to the US mainland for any reason — even for complex surgical procedures that are difficult to undertake at the remote naval base.

The ban has been in place since the early years of the Obama presidency, when it was cynically introduced by Republican lawmakers, and has been renewed every year in the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), even though, as the prisoners grow older, some of them have increasingly challenging medical issues that are difficult to resolve at the prison, where medical teams often lack equipment and personnel found readily on the mainland.

As Rosenberg explained, “The base typically sends US service members and other residents to the United States for complex care,” while shamefully denying that same level of care to prisoners, who are subject to “the constraints of so-called expeditionary medicine — the practice of mobilizing specialists and equipment to Guantánamo’s small Navy hospital specifically for the prison population.”

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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.

Two weeks ago, a significant event took place at Guantánamo, when Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a 60- or 61-year old “high-value detainee,” whose real name is Nashwan al-Tamir, and who was one of the last prisoners to arrive at Guantánamo, in April 2007, admitted to being involved in war crimes in a plea deal that could see him released from the prison by 2024.

It is the first plea deal reached with a “high-value detainee” under President Biden, and may indicate a way forward for the other nine “high-value detainee” trials, including those of the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, and of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of involvement in the attack, in 2000, on the USS Cole, in which 17 US Navy sailors were killed. The trials are stuck in seemingly endless pre-trial hearings, largely because of the seemingly unresolvable problem of providing fair trials to men who were tortured, and it is noteworthy that, in March, it was reported that plea deals were being discussed in connection with the 9/11 trial.

When al-Iraqi arrived at Guantánamo over 15 years ago, the Pentagon described him as “one of al-Qaeda’s most senior and most experienced operatives,” although details about how he ended up at Guantánamo were rather more shady. A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, explained that he had been transferred to DoD custody from the custody of the CIA, although he “would not say where or when al-Iraqi was captured or by whom,” while a US intelligence official, “speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter,” told the Associated Press that al-Iraqi had been captured in late 2006 “in an operation that involved many people in more than one country.”

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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.

Ever since the coronavirus began its alarming global spread, those who work with, and on behalf of prisoners have been aware of the threat that it poses to those who are incarcerated. This applies, as commentators have noted, whilst urging urgent action, to the many million of prisoners worldwide who are imprisoned after being tried and convicted of crimes, as well as, in some countries, political prisoners.

In the UK, lawyers urged the government, to no avail, to release Julian Assange, who is held in Belmarsh maximum security prison in London, fighting efforts by the British government to extradite him to the US to face entirely inappropriate espionage charges relating to his work with WikiLeaks, and in the US, as well as highlighting the dangers faced by the country’s 2.2 million domestic prisoners — the largest prison population per capita in the world — some activists have also been highlighting the dangers the virus poses to the 40 men still held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, all held for between 12 and 18 years, and almost all held indefinitely without charge or trial.

The plight of the Guantánamo prisoners was particularly highlighted eight days ago, on March 24, when the US Navy announced in a press release that a sailor stationed at the base had “tested positive for COVID-19” and was “currently undergoing evaluation and treatment.” The Navy’s press release added that the Department of Defense had “notified public health authorities of the positive test” and had “taken prudent precautions” to ensure that the service member was “receiving the appropriate care.” It was also noted that the sailor was “currently isolated at their home and restricted in movement in accordance with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Guidelines,” and that efforts were underway to trace recent contacts made by the sailor.

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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.

Many thanks to the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) for their new report, Deprivation and Despair: The Crisis of Medical Care at Guantánamo.

As CVT state in their introduction to the report on their website, “the experiences of detainees and independent civilian medical experts with medical care at the Guantánamo Bay detention center not only broadly refute the claim that detainees receive care equivalent to that of U.S. service members, but also evidence specific violations of the Nelson Mandela Rules, the universally recognized UN standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners, which the United States has championed.”

In the introduction to the report itself, CVT and PHR provide a summary of Guantánamo now, “in its eighteenth year”, explaining, “Forty Muslim men still languish there, 31 of whom have never been charged with a crime. Five detainees have long been cleared for transfer by consensus of the Executive Branch’s national security apparatus, which determined that the men pose no meaningful threat, if any at all, to the United States. Many of the remaining detainees are torture survivors or victims of similarly significant trauma. All of them are either suffering from or at high risk of the additional profound physical and psychological harm associated with prolonged indefinite detention, a form of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. As the men age under these conditions, they are increasingly presenting with complex medical needs.”

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