Eleven years since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the majority of the remaining 168 men in Guantánamo are not held because they constitute an active threat to the United States, but because of inertia, political opportunism and an institutional desire to hide evidence of torture by US forces, sanctioned at the highest levels of government. That they are still held, mostly without charge or trial, is a disgrace that continues to eat away at any notion that the US believes in justice.

It seems like an eternity since there was the briefest of hopes that George W. Bush’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo would be shut down. That was in January 2009, but although Barack Obama issued an executive order promising to close Guantánamo within a year, he soon reneged on that promise, failing to stand up to Republican critics, who seized on the fear of terrorism to attack him, and failing to stand up to members of his own party, who were also fearful of the power of black propaganda regarding Guantánamo and the alleged but unsubstantiated dangerousness of its inmates.

The President himself also became fearful when, in January 2010, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, which he himself had appointed, and which consisted of career officials and lawyers from government departments and the intelligence agencies, issued its report based on an analysis of the cases of the 240 prisoners inherited from George W. Bush (PDF). The Task Force recommended that, of the 240 men held when he came to power, only 36 could be prosecuted, but 48 others were regarded as being too dangerous to release, even though insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 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.

But first, please sign the petition initiated by Canadian Senator Roméo Dallaire, urging Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to sign the paperwork to bring Omar Khadr home from Guantánamo, as agreed in October 2010. This petition has gone viral, and hundreds of people have been signing it every hour. With your help, we can turn this petition into a torrent of concern and indignation that the Canadian government — and the mainstream media — cannot ignore.

Just last week, we encouraged you, our readers, to sign a petition calling for the Canadian government to secure the release from Guantánamo of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner who was supposed to have been returned to Canada last November, as part of a plea deal he agreed to in October 2010.

If you’ll forgive us for the intrusion on your time, we’d now like to ask you to sign another, similar petition, initiated by Senator Roméo Dallaire, a former Lieutenant-General in the Canadian Army, described on his website as a devoted humanitarian. The founder of the Child Soldiers Initiative, a project aimed at eradicating the use of child soldiers, Senator Dallaire recently appeared at a press conference in Ottawa to urge the Canadian government to honor its part of the deal, and to bring Omar home. Read the rest of this entry »

Update July 13: Senator Romeo Dallaire has a new petition calling for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews to sign the paperwork to bring Omar Khadr home. Please sign it!

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 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.

Please sign this petition calling for Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to secure Omar Khadr’s return from Guantánamo. 

Hosted by Change.org, this petition can be signed by anyone anywhere around the world who cares about bringing to an end the long injustice to which Omar Khadr has been subjected.

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Here at “Close Guantánamo,” we share the disdain that decent people everywhere feel regarding the Canadian government’s refusal to honor the terms of a plea deal that Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen still imprisoned at Guantánamo, agreed to in October 2010, when he pleaded guilty to war crimes in exchange for a promise that he would receive an eight-year sentence, with one year to be served in Guantánamo before his return to Canada. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I was delighted to be invited to speak at a screening of “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo,” the excellent documentary film, directed by Luc Côté and Patricio Henriquez, about the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner Omar Khadr, based on seven hours of footage, from the summer of 2003, when Omar was just 16 years old, and Canadian agents came to Guantánamo to interrogate him, painfully dashing his hopes that they would secure his return home. I was pleased to speak at the UK premiere of the film, in London in June 2011, and I also discussed it on Press TV (see here and here, and see below for a video of the film via YouTube, uploaded in March 2015).

The screening takes place on Thursday evening in the auditorium at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre, 17-25 New Inn Yard, London EC2 3EA. The event starts at 7pm, and has been arranged by Amnesty International’s Children’s Human Rights Network — which is very appropriate given Omar’s age when he was captured, and the manner in which both the US and Canadian governments have cynically discarded his right to be rehabilitated rather than punished under the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which both the US and Canada are signatories.

Tickets are free but must be booked in advance. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, lawyers for Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen and former child prisoner who has been imprisoned in Guantánamo for nearly ten years, held a press conference in Ottawa to complain about the Canadian government’s failure to honor a deal that was supposed to guarantee his return to Canada eight months ago.

It is to be hoped that the press conference has succeeded in putting pressure on the government — and particularly on Public Safety Minister Vic Toews — to stop procrastinating, and to secure Khadr’s return, as agreed in the plea deal he signed at his military commission in Guantánamo in October 2010, when he was told that he would serve one more year at Guantánamo, and then be returned to Canada to serve the last seven years of an eight-year sentence.

At the press conference, John Norris, one of Khadr’s Canadian civilian lawyers, explained that his client was “trying to pursue an education as part of his rehabilitation,” and his two US military lawyers — Lt. Col. Jon Jackson and Maj. Matthew Schwartz — explained that they had spent hundreds of hours with him, and described him as “an intelligent young man” who is quick to learn and has a “love of learning.” As the Toronto Star put it, “Schwartz taught him geography, history and practiced singing O Canada and the American anthem with him,” and “Jackson taught science and mathematics, and read Shakespeare, The Hunger Games and The Road [by Cormac McCarthy] with him.” Lt. Col. Jackson explained, “His insights into those books shows he gets it, he gets what it means to be a useful member of society.” Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 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.

Frustrated that Omar Khadr, the only Canadian citizen in Guantánamo, is still detained, eight months after he was supposed to be returned to Canada under the terms of a plea deal negotiated in October 2010, his US and Canadian lawyers — and the Canadian Senator Romeo Dallaire — held a press conference in Ottawa on Thursday to demand that the Canadian government honors its part of the agreement and secures Khadr’s return to Canada, the country of his birth.

Khadr was seized in July 2002 after a firefight in Afghanistan where he had been taken by his father, Ahmed Khadr, who is generally described as a fundraiser for Osama bin Laden. At the time of his capture he was just 15 years old, and should have been rehabilitated, under the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, to which both the US and Canada are signatories.

Instead, however, he was horribly abused in US custody, and abandoned by the Canadian government. In October 2010, under the terms of the plea deal, he accepted that he had killed US Special Forces soldier Sgt. Christopher Speer, who died in a grenade attack during the firefight, and that he was an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” who had no right to engage in combat with US forces at all, even though there is serious doubt about the claim that he threw the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer, and even though his confession effectively established a scenario in which the US claimed that it was illegal to raise arms against US forces in a war zone. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the eyes of the world were on Guantánamo, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of planning and facilitating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash — appeared in a courtroom for the first time since December 2008. All were dressed in white, apparently at the insistence of the authorities at Guantánamo, and most observers made a point of noting that Mohammed’s long gray beard was streaked red with henna.

For the Obama administration and the Pentagon, the five men’s appearance — for their arraignment prior to their planned trial by military commission — was supposed to show that the commissions are a competent and legitimate alternative to the federal court trial that the Obama administration announced for the men in November 2009, but then abandoned after caving in to pressure from Republicans. The five defendants face 2,976 counts of murder — one for each of the victims of the 9/11 attacks — as well as charges of terrorism, hijacking, conspiracy and destruction of property, and the prosecution is seeking the death penalty.

Unfortunately for the administration, the omens were not good. The military commissions have been condemned as an inadequate trial system ever since the Bush administration first resurrected them in November 2001, intending, in the heat of post-9/11 vengeance, to use them to swiftly try and execute those it regarded as terrorists. However, after long delays and chaotic hearings, this first reincarnation of the commissions was struck down as illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006. The commissions were then revived by Congress a few months later, and were then tweaked and revived by President Obama in the summer of 2009, despite criticism from legal experts. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Canadian government received a formal request for the return of Omar Khadr from Guantánamo Bay. Julie Carmichael, an aide to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, told the Globe and Mail, “The government of Canada has just received a completed application for the transfer of prisoner Omar Ahmed Khadr. A decision will be made on this file in accordance with Canadian law.”

Khadr, who was seized at the age of 15 after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, accepted a plea deal in his war crimes trial at Guantánamo in October 2010, on the basis that he would serve an eight-year sentence, but with only one year to be served in Guantánamo.

However, as the Globe and Mail described it, the government of Stephen Harper “has been reluctant to accept Mr. Khadr,” and “diplomatic wrangling over his transfer has persisted.” Despite this, as I noted last month, the US government has been putting pressure on the Canadian government, because US officials need other prisoners to be reassured that, if they accept plea deals in exchange for providing evidence against other prisoners, the terms of those plea deals will be honored. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, five months after the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner Omar Khadr was supposed to leave Guantánamo, to be returned to Canada as a result of a plea deal agreed in October 2010, it appears that he may be back in the country of his birth by the end of May.

The delay has been a disgrace, as the plea deal was supposed to guarantee that Khadr, who is now 25, would be held for one more year at Guantánamo, and would then return to Canada, to serve seven more years in prison, although it is widely expected that he “will serve only a short time in a Canadian prison before being released,” as London Free Press described it, primarily because lawyers will be able to point out the court rulings in which judges ruled that the Canadian government had persistently violated Khadr’s rights.

That first year of Khadr’s post-plea deal detention ended on October 31 last year, but he was not repatriated from Guantánamo, primarily, it seemed, because of an unwillingness to speedily facilitate his return on the part of the Canadian authorities, who have a dreadful record when it comes to doing anything to secure his return since his capture at the age of 15, when he was severely wounded, in Afghanistan in July 2002. Read the rest of this entry »

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Since March 2006, I have been researching and writing about Guantánamo and the 779 men (and boys) held there, first through my book The Guantánamo Files, and, since May 2007, as a full-time independent investigative journalist. For three years, I focused on the crimes of the Bush administration and, since January 2009, I have analyzed the failures of the Obama administration to thoroughly repudiate those crimes and to hold anyone accountable for them, and, increasingly, on President Obama’s failure to charge or release prisoners, and to show any sign that Guantánamo will eventually be closed.

As recent events marking the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo have shown, this remains an intolerable situation, as Guantánamo is as much of an aberration, and a stain on America’s belief in itself as a nation ruled by laws, as it was when it was opened by George W. Bush on January 11, 2002. Closing the prison remains as important now as it did when I began this work nearly six years ago.

Throughout my work, my intention has been to puncture the Bush administration’s propaganda about Guantánamo holding “the worst of the worst” by telling the prisoners’ stories and bringing them to life as human beings, rather than allowing them to remain as dehumanized scapegoats or bogeymen.

This has involved demonstrating that the majority of the prisoners were either innocent men, seized by the US military’s allies at a time when bounty payments were widespread, or recruits for the Taliban, who had been encouraged by supporters in their homelands to help the Taliban in a long-running inter-Muslim civil war (with the Northern Alliance), which began long before the 9/11 attacks and, for the most part, had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism. Read the rest of this entry »