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 the epidemic of disasters afflicting the world, it’s sometimes hard to even remember that, at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the US government is still holding 30 men, detained for between 15 and 22 years, who, for the most part, have never been charged with crimes, and are imprisoned, apparently indefinitely, without charge or trial.
With just a fortnight to go until the US Presidential Election, these men’s plight has become politically invisible, even though their treatment — outside of all norms governing the deprivation of liberty of individuals — has, from the beginning, relied on their demonization and dehumanization as Muslims, with a clear line stretching from their fundamentally lawless imprisonment to the way that demonized and dehumanized Muslims are being treated in the Gaza Strip today.
Now suffering under their fourth president, the men at Guantánamo had some hope, when Joe Biden took office, that positive changes were on the horizon. NGOs and lawyers had lobbied his transition team, urging that, at the very least, he address the plight of those specifically imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial, as opposed to those charged in the military commissions, a broken system, first introduced after the 9/11 attacks, before Guantánamo even opened, albeit one with some tangential connection to the law.
At the time of his inauguration, Biden was holding 40 men, 22 of whom were “forever prisoners,” held indefinitely without charge or trial. Six others had already been approved for release but were still held, while the other 12 were, to some extent or another, under the jurisdiction of the military commissions.
From May 2021 to September 2022, the Biden administration addressed these concerns. All but three of the “forever prisoners” were approved for release by Periodic Review Boards, the high-level parole-type process established under President Obama, which had previously and repeatedly recommended their ongoing imprisonment.
In addition, between July 2021 and April 2023, ten prisoners in total were released, reducing the prison’s population by a quarter, and making concrete steps towards its final closure seem almost within reach.
Then it all fell apart.
No releases for a year and a half
Even though 16 of the 30 men still held have long been approved for release, none have been freed in the last 18 months. A complication is that, although the ten men previously freed were all repatriated, third countries must be found for these 16 men — mostly Yemenis — because Republicans in Congress, since the early days of the Obama administration, have insisted on inserting provisions into the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), proscribing the return of prisoners to certain countries, including Yemen, Libya, Somalia and Afghanistan.
President Biden made an effort to address this problem by appointing a former ambassador, Tina Kaidanow, as the Special Representative for Guantánamo Affairs in the State Department in August 2021, who was “responsible for all matters pertaining to the transfer of detainees from the Guantánamo Bay facility to third countries.”
Despite a lack of high-level support within the administration, and stymied by a general lack of interest around the world in resettling former prisoners, Kaidanow nevertheless successfully negotiated the proposed resettlement, in Oman, of eleven of these 16 men, who were supposed to have been freed last October.
Shamefully, however, even though an airplane was on the tarmac at Guantánamo to take these men to their new lives, the October 7 attacks in southern Israel by Hamas and other militants persuaded Biden and his senior officials that the “political optics” no longer supported their release, and the plan was shelved, with no new date set for it to be reinstated.
Sadly, we have just heard that Tina Kaidanow has died, at just 59 years of age, without having been able to see her last, largely ignored but hugely important post yield the fruit it deserved: the removal of one dark and enduring stain on the US’s reputation, through the restoration of these men’s freedom.
Broken trials and UN condemnation
In the military commissions, too, the administration has slammed the brakes on any progress in the seemingly endless effort by the US government to successfully prosecute men subjected to horrendous torture in CIA “black sites” prior to their arrival at Guantánamo, mostly in September 2006.
Three years ago, prosecutors finally recognized that the use of torture precluded the possibility of successful prosecutions, and began negotiating with defense lawyers, and the Convening Authority, the government-appointed official overseeing the commissions, to secure plea deals instead with the men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
These took the death penalty off the table, and would have provided life sentences at Guantánamo in return for confessions that would have finally allowed for some sort of closure for the relatives of those killed on September 11, 2001. However, when it was announced, in August this year, that plea deals had been agreed with three of these men, the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, almost immediately revoked them, once more rendering justice and any kind of closure off-limits.
Through this long period of inertia and of counter-productive measures, the US government has also been subjected to withering criticism by various United Nations Special Mandate holders, which, shamefully, it has entirely ignored.
These reports and opinions were published throughout 2023, beginning with condemnation, from numerous Special Mandate holders, on January 11, the 21st anniversary of the prison’s opening, of the treatment of Guantánamo’s most disabled prisoner, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (charged in the military commissions), and continuing with two other devastating opinions, issued by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, one in the case of “forever prisoner” Abu Zubaydah, and the other in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (also charged in the military commissions), with the Abu Zubaydah opinion also indicating that the very basis of the detention system at Guantánamo “may constitute crimes against humanity.”
Finally, in June 2023, a report issued by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism, concluded, as a result of assessments undertaken after she became the first ever UN Rapporteur to visit the prison, in February 2023, that, despite some improvement in conditions over the years, the prison’s operations overall still constitute “ongoing cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment,” and “may also meet the legal threshold for torture.”
So is there hope for the future?
Perhaps, ironically, if Kamala Harris loses to Donald Trump in the Presidential Election, pressure to free all the men approved for release before Trump’s inauguration in January will become unavoidable, because Trump, as he was in his first term in office, will be an absolute disaster for the men held at Guantánamo, sealing the prison shut as he did throughout his four lamentable years as president.
If Harris does win, however, it is to be hoped that there will also be renewed pressure to free the men approved for release, even though the very basis of safe and secure resettlements in third countries — already undermined by the brutal treatment of men resettled in the UAE between 2015 and 2017, who found themselves imprisoned instead of being helped to rebuild their lives, before being forcibly repatriated — was dealt a major blow in August, when Oman, the great hope for the men awaiting release, which had previously accepted 28 Yemenis from Guantánamo between 2015 and 2017, also repatriated these men, mostly against their will, and in defiance of the promises made when they were first taken in — which is, of course, that their resettlement would be permanent.
Alarmingly, Vincent M. Picard, a spokesman for the State Department’s counterterrorism division, stated that, “In general, the United States government has never had an expectation that former Guantánamo detainees would indefinitely remain in receiving countries,” even though that provides no explanation whatsoever about where they are supposed to go if their resettlements come to an end.
As Fionnuala Ní Aoláin explained, with reference to the Yemenis in Oman, “Non-refoulement [not returning anyone to a country where they face a risk of torture or other ill-treatment] should be an absolute protection, because countries like Oman have a choice to protect these vulnerable torture survivors or not.”
As she also explained, “Sending these men to Yemen puts them in profound danger. Yemen is a country in the midst of a brutal civil war, and is also being bombed by the United States and other allied countries. Sending former Guantánamo detainees, men who have been the victims of US torture and ill-treatment back to Yemen flies in the face of the most fundamental human rights obligations of both Oman and the United States.”
What can we do?
On the ground, our options as concerned citizens appear limited, although, as has been the case throughout Guantánamo’s long and sordid history of abject brutality and lawlessness, matched by the almost complete indifference (or even hostility) of most of the political class, the mainstream media and US citizens themselves, those of us who care must continue to do whatever we can to publicize the plight of the men still held, to bear witness to their suffering, and to point out how corrosive the rancid ongoing existence of Guantánamo is to all notions of human rights, due process and international humanitarian law.
Since January 2018, we have been running an ongoing photo campaign, every 100 days of Guantánamo’s existence (and also, every year, on the anniversary of Guantánamo’s opening, on January 11), for which our supporters take photos of themselves — or have photographs taken of them — with posters marking these grim milestones, and calling for Guantánamo’s closure.
On October 1, we marked 8,300 days of the prison’s existence, and were delighted to receive 70 photos from across the US and around the world — some from regular participants, and others from new supporters.
The photo campaign was somewhat in the doldrums in the Trump years, and took some time to pick up under Biden, but since last December, when we marked 8,000 days, it has been reinvigorated, in part because of the unique contributions of Gavrilah Wells, an activist in San Francisco, who, uniquely, wanders the streets of her home city with her camera and a copy of the poster, engaging with those she meets, and seeking to get them involved.
As I told her in an email, “You have single-handedly breathed new life into this project, with your wonderful portraits, which capture a largely hidden truth about the US — that people everywhere oppose the continued existence of Guantanamo, but nobody normally asks them what they think. I wish some local or national media would pick up on what you’re doing!”
We also continue to highlight the injustice of Guantánamo’s continued existence, through monthly vigils, which take place on the first Wednesday of every month, and have regular support in eleven locations across the US and around the world — in Washington, D.C., in London, New York City, San Francisco, Mexico City, Brussels, Cobleskill, NY, Detroit, Minneapolis and Portland, Oregon.
One particular focus of the vigils is the 16 men approved for release but still held, via a poster of them, and a second poster, which I update every month, and which shows how disgracefully long they have been waiting to be freed since those decisions were taken. On October 2, when the most recent vigils took place, these men had, disgracefully, been waiting for between 740 and 1,434 days since those decisions were taken, and in three outlying cases for 5,367 days.
Sadly, shamefully, the mainstream media have shown no interest whatsoever in either the ongoing photo campaign or the monthly vigils, even though, in particular, the amount of time that the 16 men have been held since they were approved for release is nothing short of a national scandal.
Nevertheless, I believe that our continuing efforts to raise awareness of the glaring injustices of Guantánamo are worthwhile, and I hope you agree. We are all watching intensely what happens on November 5, which won’t, either way, probably help the Muslims in the Gaza Strip, but will hopefully, one way or another, help to, at least, secure freedom for these 16 men. We’ll keep you posted!
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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.
Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.
To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.
Eight months of unmitigated horror in Gaza demonstrates the absolute moral degradation of Israel, and the unparalleled moral failure of the west.
It’s eight months since Hamas and other militants broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip, where they, and the entire Palestinian population of 2.3 million people, had been subjected to a land, sea and air blockade for 16 years, and embarked on a brief but deadly killing spree in southern Israel, killing 1,068 Israelis (695 civilians and 373 members of the military and the police), as well as 71 foreign nationals, and kidnapping around 235 others, around half of whom were Israeli.
In response, as happened on numerous previous occasions when Israel was attacked by Palestinian military forces resisting the occupation of their land, Israel began carpet bombing the Gaza Strip, destroying key infrastructure, levelling apartment blocks with disproportionately heavy-duty bombs provided mainly by the US and Germany, and killing vast numbers of civilians.
In 2014, when Israel undertook the most savage of its many previous attacks on the Gaza Strip, a seven-week campaign killed over 2,300 Palestinians, wounded nearly 11,000 (including 3,374 children, of whom over 1,000 were permanently disabled), and led to the destruction of 7,000 homes, with an additional 89,000 damaged, before a ceasefire was finally reached.
I just want the bombing to stop. Billions of us around the world just want to the bombing to stop. But last night, in Rafah, Israel dropped countless US-supplied 2,000-pound bombs — hideously powerful weapons designed to pierce otherwise impenetrable military targets — on a displaced Palestinian civilian population, living in flimsy makeshift tents in what they were told was a “safe zone,” burning dozens of them alive, including children who were decapitated as their bodies burned.
For seven and a half months, a moral sickness has engulfed the State of Israel, also infecting parliaments and the mainstream media throughout most of the western world, as shrill, bullying and sometime gleeful proponents of genocide have sought to compel us, sometimes through violence, and often through intimidation, not only to turn a blind eye to the murder of 40,000 civilians in the Gaza Strip — killed with bombs of such intensity that they shouldn’t even exist, let alone be dropped onto packed civilian neighbourhoods day after day after day — but to endorse it, to support it as enthusiastically as they do.
For seven and a half months, those of us living in the majority of the countries of the west (or the Global North), have been ordered to believe that, despite the openly genocidal comments that have been regularly and insistently made by Israel’s leaders since the deadly attacks on southern Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7 last year, (in which 1,139 people were killed), Israel’s response, in which most of the Gaza Strip has been destroyed, and 10,000 decomposing corpses are buried under the rubble, is not a genocide, but simply Israel exercising its “right to defend itself”, to “eliminate Hamas”, and to free the hostages seized by Hamas and other militants on October 7.
For seven and half months, we have been told that “this began on October 7”, in a blatant and frankly sickening effort to erase 76 years of oppression of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel, oppression which began in earnest with the blood-soaked establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were murdered and 750,000 permanently exiled from their homes, but which actually began decades before, via the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British government, then ruling Palestine as a Mandate after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, announced its support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, and encouraged the migration of hundreds of thousands of European Jews.
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 NBC News, and the four anonymous US government officials who spoke to them, for exposing the latest scandal involving the US prison at Guantánamo Bay — the refusal of the Biden administration to release eleven men, for whom long months of negotiation had secured a safe and viable resettlement option, because of the perceived “political optics” of freeing them after the attacks on Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7.
Within Guantánamo circles, this scandal was well known, but attorneys for the men had been subjected to a Protective Order issued by the government, preventing them from talking about it, and, as a result, they had all dutifully kept quiet, as had others, like myself, who had got to know about it.
Their silence is, in itself, an indictment of how the US government operates at Guantánamo, as I also recognised when I refused to publicize it, because of the fundamentally lawless situation in which these men are held.
For over seven months, the Israeli military, largely using weapons provided by the United States and Germany, has been bombing the Gaza Strip with an intensity unmatched in modern history. In March, the NGO Humanity & Inclusion assessed that, on average, 500 bombs a day had been dropped on Gaza, meaning that, as of today, the total number of bombs dropped exceeds 100,000.
Hundreds of these bombs have been US-supplied 2,000lb bombs, which, last week, Frank Gardner, the BBC’s Security Correspondent, citing the UN, described as having “a lethal fragmentation radius of 350 metres”, which “can penetrate concrete more than three metres thick”, and which “leave a crater over 15 metres wide, making it completely unsuitable for use in a place heavily populated by civilians.” As Gardner added, “Even for those people several streets away, the effects can be horrific”, with the UN stating that “the pressure from the explosion can rupture lungs, burst sinus cavities and tear off lies hundreds of metres from the blast site.”
The Gaza Strip, which is home to 2.3 million people — largely the descendants of refugees from the brutal and bloody ethnic cleansing that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 — covers just 140 square miles (or 365 square kilometres) of land along the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea — roughly half the size of New York City, and a quarter of the size of London.
Who knew, just seven months ago, that it would be Joe Biden, the Democratic President of the United States, who would be responsible for supporting a genocide, and for the most severe betrayal of the principles of international humanitarian law and the most acute increase in the suppression of free speech that any of us in the west have seen in our lifetimes?
The trigger, of course, was Biden’s response to the attacks in Israel by Hamas and other militants on October 7, 2023, when, having broken out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip, they killed 1,068 Israeli civilians (695 civilians and 373 members of the military and the police), as well as 71 foreign nationals, and abducted around 240 hostages (both Israeli and foreign nationals), taking them back to the Gaza Strip with the intention of using them for hostage exchanges with some of the many thousands of Palestinians, including women and children, who are held in Israeli prisons in shockingly brutal and fundamentally lawless conditions.
These attacks were horrendous, but they didn’t take place in a vacuum. Since 1948, when the State of Israel was created — largely by settlers who arrived from Europe in their hundreds of thousands, after the British, administering Palestine following the fall of the Ottoman Empire, promised it to them as a Jewish homeland — and its founders killed around 15,000 Palestinians, and forced 700,000 others into exile, violence and bloodshed have defined the story of this bitterly contested land.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been suffering from a state of exhaustion that made me wonder if I had some undiagnosed terminal illness. I’ve been unable to concentrate, and, as soon as I woke up, I was wondering when I could go back to bed again.
Yesterday, the fog finally lifted, and I realized that my exhaustion was almost certainly a result of the dire state of the world right now — primarily related to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza (still, after the murder of over 37,000 civilians, largely supported by western politicians and the mainstream media), but also to the cascading climate collapse that these same politicians and media outlets don’t want to talk about.
On Gaza, I suspect that my exhaustion was primarily related to an overwhelming sense of futility and powerlessness regarding any hope that the relentless genocide might be stopped. For those, like myself, who have been watching this grotesque live-streamed genocide unfold for over six months — ever since Hamas militants and other Gaza-based militants broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip on October 7 and killed 695 Israeli civilians, 373 members of the military and the police, and 71 foreign nationals — there have only been a few moments when hope appeared to be in the ascendant, and on each occasion the aftermath, when that hope was crushed, has been difficult to negotiate.
On Wednesday (April 3) the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor published its latest infographic showing how many Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli since October 7 — 41,496 Palestinians in 180 days. That’s 230 a day, or nearly ten people killed every single hour for the last six months.
This is a devastating indictment of Israel’s actions, and is also damning with regard to all the western nations, led by the US, who have been supporting this unprecedented frenzy of civilian slaughter.
According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, who, notably, include the nearly 10,000 people buried under the rubble of countless bombing attacks, the total death toll includes 15,370 children and 9,671 women, with 90% of the dead identified as civilians.
Today marks 900 days since Sanad al-Kazimi, a 54-year old Yemeni, and a father of four, was unanimously approved for release from Guantánamo by a Periodic Review Board, a high-level US government review process established under President Obama.
This article, telling his story, is the ninth in an ongoing series of ten articles, published since early February, telling the stories of the 16 men (out of 30 still held at Guantánamo in total) who have long been approved for release. The articles are published alternately here and on the Close Guantánamo website, with their publication tied into significant dates in their long ordeal.
While most of the 779 men held at Guantánamo since it opened over 22 years ago were picked up — or bought — in Afghanistan or Pakistan and processed through military prisons in Afghanistan before their arrival at Guantánamo (mostly between December 2001 and November 2003), al-Kazimi was one of around 40 prisoners whose arrival at Guantánamo involved a more circuitous route, through the network of CIA “black sites” established and run in other countries between March 2002 and September 2006, and, in some cases, in proxy prisons in other countries run on behalf of the CIA.
Last week, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the Geneva-based NGO, published its latest assessment of the death toll in Gaza, after 160 days of Israel’s relentless genocidal assault on the largely civilian population of the Gaza Strip, refugees from the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the blood-soaked establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, who, for the last 17 years, have been trapped in what Human Rights Watch described in 2022 as an “open-air prison”, because of Israel’s total blockade of all routes in and out, but which it would now be more accurate to describe as the world’s largest open-air graveyard, or the world’s largest concentration camp.
Shamefully, no mainstream media outlet took an interest in Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor’s assessment, even though it reported, credibly, that the death toll from Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has now surpassed 40,000 (40,042, according to the report), with 14,861 of those killed being children, and 9,273 being women, and with 36,330 of those killed (90%) assessed as having been civilians.
Over 160 days, this means that, on average, 250 Palestinians have been killed every day — or ten every hour — with nearly a hundred of those killed every day being children.
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. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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