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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.

With the release from Guantánamo three weeks ago of the Saudi citizen Ghassan al-Sharbi, the prison now holds just 31 men, out of the 779 held by the US military since it first opened over 21 years ago.

17 of these 31 men have been approved for release, and yet there is no way of knowing when, if ever, they will be released, because they did not have their release ordered by a court, but recommended by administrative review processes, and, as a result, they cannot appeal to a judge to order their release if, as is the case, the government shows no sense of urgency when it comes to freeing them.

Complicating matters, however, we acknowledge that, in the cases of 13 of these men, the US government must find third countries prepared to offer them new homes, because provisions inserted by Republicans into the annual National Defense Authorization Act since the early years of the Obama presidency prevent any repatriations from Guantánamo to countries including Yemen, Libya and Somalia, and eleven of these men are Yemeni, one is a Libyan, and another is a Somali. An additional complication is that none of these men can be resettled in the US, because another provision in the NDAA prevents any Guantánamo prisoner from being brought to the US mainland for any reason.

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Thanks to the many campaigners who turned up on Wednesday (March 8) in London, Washington, D.C., New York and Mexico City for four coordinated global vigils calling for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

It was a day of extremes. Those in London for the UK Guantánamo Network’s vigil had to endure an extraordinarily cold, wet day, while in Washington, D.C. it was warm, and in Mexico City, apparently, it was almost unbearably hot.

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With the release from Guantánamo last week of the Rabbani brothers, Ahmed and Abdul Rahim, the last two Pakistanis in the prison, Guantánamo now holds just 32 men, at an annual cost of at least $17 million a prisoner.

18 of these men — like the Rabbanis — have been approved for release, and yet they are still held because the Biden administration is not legally compelled to free them — unlike Majid Khan, who completed a military commission sentence last year and was resettled in Belize a month ago.

This is because the high-level government review processes that determined, unanimously, that the US no longer wanted to hold these men were purely administrative, meaning that the men, unlike Khan, cannot ask a judge to order their release, even though none of them have never even been charged with a crime.

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I’m just back in the UK after a ten-day trip to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay that has, I think, been as constructive as anyone could have expected. I took part in a prominent rally in Washington, D.C., two speaking events with lawyers representing prisoners, one TV interview and six radio interviews.

The rally (video here) was outside the White House on January 11, the 18th anniversary of the opening of the prison, where I spoke as a representative of the Close Guantánamo campaign, which I established with the attorney Tom Wilner eight years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison. The rally also involved representatives of numerous other groups that remain concerned about the existence of Guantánamo, including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Witness Against Torture, whose members fast and stage actions in the run-up to the anniversary, and who, in their orange jumpsuits and hoods, provide a suitably grim theatrical backdrop to the occasion.

On Monday January 13, Tom Wilner and I spoke at the New America think-tank, a well-attended event for which, I hope, a video will be available soon. I then returned to New York, where I was interviewed by RT in a seven-minute feature that, shockingly, constituted the sole focus on the Guantánamo anniversary in the whole of the US broadcast media, and I then took part in my second speaking event, at Revolution Books in Harlem, which I’m posting below.

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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.

I’m delighted that the video is now available of my speaking event, “Guantánamo, Torture and the Trump Agenda,” at Revolution Books in Harlem, which took place last week as part of my annual visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison on and around the anniversary of its opening — on January 11.

This year — the 16th anniversary of its opening, and the first anniversary in which it was open under the control of Donald Trump — I was particularly aware of the passage of time, and the prison’s horrendously long existence. As a result, I came up with a revival of the Gitmo Clock that I first set up under President Obama in 2013, counting how many days the prison has been open — 5,845 days on the anniversary, and 5,859 days today — and if you’re interested at in the closure of Guantánamo, then please get involved. Posters for every 25 days are available on the Gitmo Clock website, and the next poster is for 5,875 days on February 6. Please take a photo with the poster, and send it to us, and we’ll post it on the Close Guantánamo website and on social media.

In my various talks on my trip, and in discussions with fellow activists, I also made frequent allusions to how long the prison has been open, noting that my son, who just turned 18, was only two years old when Guantánamo opened, and asking people to think about how long it would take them to think of 5,845 things, one for each day the prison has been open. I’d actually like to make a video featuring one image of each day Guantánamo has been open, and if you’re a filmmaker, and this is of interest to you, then do get in touch. Read the rest of this entry »

See my photos on Flickr here!

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.

Last month, when I was discussing with Debra Sweet, the national director of the campaigning group the World Can’t Wait, how long to stay in the US on my annual trip to call for the closure of Guantánamo on and around the anniversary of its opening on January 11, we decided that it was worth staying for the Women’s March on January 20. Debra has been coordinating my January visits to the US since 2011, and I had stayed until January 21 last year, and took part in the colossal 500,000-strong march in New York, and we both felt that there was no good reason to miss it this year, as it promised yet again to be an opportunity for millions of women — and men — to tell Donald Trump what they think of him.

Last year, there was a huge outpouring of anger at the arrival in the White House of Trump, who had somehow become president despite his extraordinary unsuitability for the role: his complete lack of political experience, and his very public deficiencies — his rudeness, his vindictiveness, his inability to complete even a simple coherent sentence, his sordid history as a sexual predator, and the groundless illusion of his success as a businessman. This thoroughly unpleasant figure had particularly appalled women because of his “grab ‘em by the p*ssy” comment that had been revealed during the election campaign, but that had somehow failed to derail him.

A year on, the anger against Trump is surely more palpable, and more based on experience, than a year ago. This president is a bitter joke, the dysfunctional head of a dangerously right-wing version of the Republican Party, who governs by tweet, and constantly threatens,and tries to deliver on policies that reveal a profound and troubling racism: his attempted Muslim travel ban, for example, and the marked increase in his assault on the most vulnerable members of US society — the immigrants on whom the US economy depends, but whose presence, as with Brexit and immigrants in the UK, is perceived by self-pitying white people as being the source of their economic woes, rather than the truth: that it is the fault of the neoliberal machinery of political and big business, a world which, fundamentally, Donald Trump is as much a part of as the “elites” for which his supporters have nothing but contempt. Read the rest of this entry »

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, and my imminent visit to the US, discussed below.

On Monday, I fly into New York from London for what will be my eighth successive January visit to the US to call for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. Despite the generally inhospitable climate and the unpleasantness of the cause, it has always been exciting to visit, as I have met and got to know the people who should be running the US — the campaigners, principled lawyers and ordinary citizens who have made a stand against the existence of the prison, recognizing it as a profound injustice, established in the heat of vengeance after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which is a source of shame to all decent Americans every day that it remains open.

A majority of Americans, unfortunately, don’t understand how important it is to rely on established and internationally accepted procedures when depriving people of their liberty. Those imprisoned should either be criminal suspects, charged as swiftly as possible and put on trial in a federal court, or prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, and held unmolested until the end of hostilities. At Guantánamo, however, the men held were deprived of all rights, and held as “unlawful enemy combatants” — “for the express purpose of denying them the rights that combatants normally receive,” as Human Rights First has explained in a briefing.

This would be bad enough, but the very basis for holding the men has always been a disgrace — although one, sadly, that has never received the mainstream coverage it cries out for. Contrary to claims that the men and boys held at Guantánamo were “the worst of the worst,” who were all captured on the battlefield, most were captured not by the US, but by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, who didn’t find them on the battlefield, and who often sold them to the US, which was paying bounties averaging $5000 a head for anyone who could be portrayed as a member of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

What a nasty racist clown Donald Trump is.

In response to the arrest of Sayfullo Saipov, a permanent US resident of Uzbek origin who is charged with killing eight people in an attack in New York, the Washington Post reported the following:

President Trump said Wednesday that he is considering sending the Uzbek immigrant accused of killing eight people in Tuesday’s terrorist attack in New York to the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the United States must be “much tougher” with its treatment of terror suspects.

Trump also called on Congress to immediately dismantle the State Department’s Diversity Visa Lottery program, through which authorities have said the suspected attacker, Sayfullo Saipov, came to the United States from Uzbekistan.

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After the shock of Donald Trump’s inauguration day, when millions of Americans (and visiting foreigners like me) felt understandably distraught, bereft, dismayed, as the grotesque, narcissistic, predatory, corrupt fraud that is Donald Trump delivered a bleak and graceless inauguration speech, it was nothing short of a delight on Saturday, Jan. 21, Day 2 of the aberrant Trump presidency, when, across the country and around the world, millions of women (plus large numbers of supportive men) marched in protest against Trump and all he and his administration stand for— his disdain for women, his racism, his xenophobia, his adherence to intolerant white Christian fundamentalism, and, last but not least, his opaque, but very obviously corrupt business practices. Two US academics have estimated that between 3.3m and 4.6m people marched in total across the US, with New York’s turnout estimated at between 400,000 and 500,000 people.

Stepping out of Grand Central Station into a river of protest, with more clever, witty and insightful handmade posters than you could imagine, and with chants and cheers punctuating the general hubbub at regular intervals was to feel that perhaps this dystopian vision of America can indeed be overthrown before it wreaks untold havoc at home and abroad. And with no beginning or end of the protest in sight, it was easy to believe that the number marching was much larger than even the academics’ estimate.

It will take more than one day, of course, as the people of America need to unite like never before — everyone who didn’t vote for Trump, everyone threatened by Trump, everyone appalled by Trump, including, of course, those who voted for him but might already be having second thoughts. This could be a disastrous presidency, or it could be even worse than that, but people need to put aside any notions of complacency, and work out how to resist. This was a great start, and a historic moment that everyone there will remember, but now there needs to be much more action and organizing. 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 over the next two months.

Dear friends and supporters,

I’m delighted to be writing to you from Heathrow Airport — despite a seriously disruptive Tube strike in London — awaiting a flight to New York City, for what will be my seventh annual visit at this time of year, to campaign for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on and around the anniversary of its opening, on Jan. 11.

I’m not delighted to have to keep calling for Guantánamo’s closure, of course, and this year, the 15th anniversary of the prison’s opening is a particular difficult occasion: simultaneously, a definitive black mark against President Obama for having failed to fulfill the promise to close the prison — within a year! — that he made when he first took office eight years ago, and the introduction to Guantánamo under a third president, the worryingly unpredictable Donald Trump, who has vowed to keep Guantánamo open, and to “load it up with bad dudes,” and who, just days ago, tweeted that there should be no more releases from Guantánamo.

Trump’s comments came in spite of the fact that 19 of the 55 men still held have been approved for release by high-level, inter-agency review processes, and others may well be approved for release in future by the latest review process, the Periodic Review Boards, unless he decides, unwisely, to scrap them.

I will be talking about these topics, and reflecting on Guantánamo’s history, what it means, who is held, and why the closure of the prison remains so essential, during my visit. Read the rest of this entry »