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.
For more years than we care to remember, campaigners for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay have met in Washington, D.C., on and around January 11, the anniversary of its opening (in 2002), to call for its closure.
Although a coalition of groups have been involved in these annual protests — including Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Religious Campaign Against Torture — the protests’ beating heart has always been Witness Against Torture, founded in 2005 by 25 Catholic Workers. The Catholic Worker Movement was founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, whose Christian anarchism, as it has been described, is focused on “liv[ing] in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ,” with “no place for economic exploitation or war,” and no “racial, gender or religious discrimination.”
The 25 founding members of Witness Against Torture, including Frida Berrigan, Matt Daloisio and Art Laffin, who are still involved today, visited Cuba in December 2005, raising publicity as they bravely attempted to visit Guantánamo, and on their return they began organizing with other groups, including CCR, protesting at the White House, and other key locations — the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Justice Department — and sometimes getting arrested.
Last week was a good one for Guantánamo activism. Following the wonderful news about the release of Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, Saifullah Paracha, over 40 people — from the US, the UK and Mexico City, plus five former prisoners in Serbia, Morocco and the Netherlands — took photos of themselves (or had photos taken of them) with the Close Guantánamo campaign’s poster marking 7,600 days of the prison’s existence on November 1. All the photos can be found on the Close Guantánamo website here, and also on the campaign’s Facebook page.
Some of the photos were taken the day after, at a well-attended UK Guantánamo Network vigil for the closure of the prison outside the US Embassy in Nine Elms, London. Largely driven by the energy of Sara Birch, the chair of the Lewes Amnesty Group, the UK Guantánamo Network includes members of various Amnesty Groups, Close Guantánamo, the Guantánamo Justice Campaign, the London Guantánamo Campaign and Freedom From Torture, and members have been holding online meetings since last year, working towards raising the profile of Guantánamo in the UK, by seeking to persuade MPs to re-establish an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Guantánamo (more on that soon), and also through protests and vigils.
For the 20th anniversary, in January this year, the UK Guantánamo Network arranged a march from Parliament Square to Trafalgar Square, where, despite torrential rain, there was a vigil, with speakers including John McDonnell MP (who chaired the APPG on Shaker Aamer back in 2014-15, which helped secure the release of the last British resident in Guantánamo), the film director Kevin Macdonald (the director of ‘The Mauritanian’, about Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who read out a message from Mohamedou) and myself. The march and vigil was also supported by several supporters of Julian Assange, whose case is tied in with Guantánamo through WikiLeaks’ publication of classified US files from the prison in 2011, on which I worked as media partner.
It took 19 years and three months, but finally Saifullah Paracha, 75, Guantánamo’s oldest prisoner, has been freed from the prison and repatriated to Pakistan, where he has been reunited with his family. The photo at the top of this article was taken as he celebrated his freedom in Karachi, with a cup of tea in a branch of McDonald’s. It was posted on Twitter on October 29 by one of his lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, who called it a “belatedly happy day,” noting that “he should never have been kidnapped & locked up 18 [actually 19] yrs ago.”
In a follow-up tweet on October 30, Stafford Smith added that he had “just had the nicest morning chat” with Saifullah, also explaining that, until the very end, the hysterical over-reaction that has typified the US’s treatment of the 779 men it largely rounded up indiscriminately, sent to Guantánamo, and then fabricated reasons for holding them indefinitely without charge or trial, was still in place. “It took 40 US personnel to take one 75 yo home from Guantánamo Bay”, Stafford Smith wrote.
The over-reaction was grotesque on two fronts: firstly, because Saifullah was regarded as a model prisoner at Guantánamo, who, as the US authorities explained in 2016, “has been very compliant with the detention staff and espouses moderate views and acceptance of Western norms,” and “has focused on improving cell block conditions and helping some detainees improve their English-language and business skills”; and, secondly, because a robust government review process — the Periodic Review Boards, involving “one senior official from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and State; the Joint Staff, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence” — had unanimously concluded, in May 2021, that “continued law of war detention [was] no longer necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States.”
In the sixteen years and eight months since I began working on Guantánamo on a full-time basis, I’ve built up an unprecedented archive of nearly 2,500 articles telling the stories of men held there, following their efforts to secure release from the prison, and, in the cases of all but the 36 men still held, writing about their release, and, in some cases, their lives afterwards.
In 2009, I first compiled a definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, listing all the men (and boys) held at the prison, providing references to where I told their stories in my book The Guantánamo Files, published in 2007, and also providing links to all my articles mentioning them. I updated the list in 2010 (twice), 2011, 2014, 2016 and 2018, and have now updated it for the eighth time, adding links to the articles I’ve written over the last four years.
I hope this is of interest, and you can find the six articles here: Part 1 (ISN prisoner numbers 1-133), Part 2 (134-268), Part 3 (269-496), Part 4 (497-661), Part 5 (662-928) and Part 6 (929-10029).
On September 23, a Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo — a parole-type process introduced under President Obama — approved the release of Ismael Ali Bakush, a 54-year old Libyan who has been held at the prison without charge or trial since August 2002.
Bakush was one of 22 ”forever prisoners” that President Biden inherited from Donald Trump — men held indefinitely without charge or trial because Obama’s first review process, the Guantánamo Review Task Force, had concluded after reviewing their cases in 2009 that they either still constituted a threat to the US, whilst also conceding that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial (as was the case with Bakush), or, in other cases, because they had been recommended for prosecution by the task force, but that option had been dropped when the viability of Guantánamo’s unique trial system — the military commissions — had been rocked by a number of successful appeals.
64 men were initially put forward for the PRBs, when the process was established in 2013, and, between 2014 and 2016, 38 of them had their release recommended (and all but two were freed before Obama left office), but Bakush, whose first review took place in July 2016, was one of the 26 others who had failed to persuade the board members that it was safe to recommend him for release, even though the only alleged evidence that connected him with Al-Qaeda was his membership of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an organization of Libyan exiles committed, primarily, to the overthrow of the Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi, but which, the US authorities claimed, “had merged with al-Qaida.”
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.
When President Biden was elected in November 2020, opponents of the continued existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay were cautiously optimistic that there would be renewed movement towards the closure of the prison.
After four years of Donald Trump, it was hard not to have some semblance of hope that there would be progress towards finally ridding the US — and the world — of this lingering symbol of the brutal and lawless excesses of George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” where men have been subjected to torture and other forms of abuse, and where the majority of the 779 men held by the military since the prison opened on January 11, 2002 have been imprisoned without charge or trial, and with little effort made to ensure that the law extended to them in any meaningful sense.
Nearly two years into Biden’s presidency, our cautious optimism has been both rewarded and thwarted.
No doubt chastened by the Republican backlash that greeted President Obama’s stated intention, as soon as he took office, of closing Guantánamo within a year, Biden took a low-key approach instead — not speaking openly about Guantánamo at all, and only indicating, via his press secretary, that there would be a review of the prison’s operations, and that the administration hoped to close it by the end of his presidency.
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.
On August 23, a Periodic Review Board at Guantánamo (an administrative, parole-type review process established by President Obama, featuring high-level US government officials) approved the ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial of Abu Faraj al-Libi, one of 14 “high-value detainees” who were brought to Guantánamo from CIA “black sites” in September 2006, and the last of the 14 to be captured.
Al-Libi’s hearing took place on June 23, and was the first time he had engaged with the PRB process since it was established in 2013. This ought to be have been newsworthy, but, in fairness, no media outlet could have been expected to know that he would finally deign to appear at the hearing, after refusing to take part in any previous opportunities to engage with the US authorities — or with the wider world.
However, it is a sad sign of the general lack of media interest in the shameful extra-judicial world of Guantánamo, where he has been held for 16 years without charge or trial, that only one media outlet — the New York Times — even bothered to find out what the board decided in his case after this first, momentous personal appearance, with veteran Guantánamo reporter Carol Rosenberg tweeting on August 29, “Just in: The Guantánamo review board has upheld the indefinite detention of the never charged former CIA prisoner called Abu Faraj al-Libi.”
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.
Many thanks to BBC World reporter Joel Gunter for his recent detailed article, “The sudden silencing of Guantánamo’s artists,” about the wonderful artwork produced by some of the men held in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, a lifeline for them since they were first allowed to express themselves during the Obama presidency, but one that has become considerably compromised in recent years, after the Pentagon took exception to an exhibition of some of the prisoners’ artwork at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City from October 2017 to January 2018.
“Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo Bay” featured art by eight current and former prisoners, mostly innocuous scenes drawn from nature, all of which had been approved for release by the Pentagon after screening to assure officials that they didn’t contain hidden terrorist messages. Some of the artists showed noticeable talent, although the most striking works were ships and boats made by a Yemeni prisoner, Moath al-Alwi, using recycled materials.
I wrote at the time about the importance of prisoners being allowed to express themselves artistically after their long years of what was, fundamentally, profound isolation under President Bush, and of the importance of their art being allowed to be seen in the US, to show the men as human beings rather than the “super-terrorist” bogeymen that is the default position towards them that has been taken by the US government and the mainstream media, even though the overwhelming majority of the 779 men held at Guantánamo since it first opened in January 2002 have never been charged with a crime, and were almost certainly nothing more than foot soldiers or even civilians seized by mistake.
20 years and two months since the Yemeni prisoner Khaled Qassim (aka Khalid Qasim) arrived at Guantánamo, where he has been held ever since without charge or trial, he has finally been approved for release. 25 years old at the time his capture, and frozen in time in the only known photo of him, taken at Guantánamo in the early years of his imprisonment, he is now 45 years old, and has, as a result, spent almost half his life at the prison.
The announcement that Khaled has been approved for release is wonderful news, as those of us who have been studying Guantánamo closely know that he is a talented artist (I posted an article about his art when it was shown in New York two years ago), and, in addition, we learned via his close friend, the released prisoner and author Mansoor Adayfi, that he is also a natural leader, a beautiful singer, a writer, a teacher and a talented football player.
Mansoor told us that Khaled’s natural leadership abilities meant that, in 2010, a Navy Commander said of him, “We like Khalid to represent all the detainees. He talks like a poet when he speaks on behalf of the detainees, and he’s an easy man to deal with,” although he was also, in the prison’s early years, a persistent hunger striker, one of around dozen young, mainly Yemeni prisoners who, as Adayfi explained in his powerful memoir, “Don’t Forget Us Here,” published last year, countered the US’s brutality and injustice with perpetual resistance, as did Adayfi himself.
Good news from Guantánamo, where the prison’s population has dropped to 36 with the release of the Afghan prisoner Asadullah Haroon Gul.
In a deal negotiated with the ruling Taliban government in Afghanistan, Gul was flown to Qatar, where he was welcomed by Taliban representatives who then arranged from him to be flown home to Afghanistan, to be reunited with his family, including his parents, his wife and his daughter, who he has not seen since she was a baby.
Gul’s release brings to an end a 15-year ordeal of imprisonment without charge or trial, which began when he arrived at Guantánamo in June 2007, at the age of 25 or 26, as one of the last detainees to arrive at the prison, having been seized in Afghanistan four months earlier.
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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