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Is it really true? After 470 days of the most grotesque, publicly-celebrated, western-backed atrocities that any of us have ever seen, dare we hope that a durable ceasefire has been agreed that will bring to an end the soul-draining horrors of Israel’s relentless efforts to exterminate the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip?

On Wednesday (January 15), the Prime Minister of Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, announced the agreement of a ceasefire deal, agreed to by Israel and Hamas, in negotiations involving Qatar, Egypt and the US. President Biden and the President-Elect, Donald Trump, both claimed responsibility for securing the success of the deal, although it was noticeable that the terms of the deal were almost identical to those agreed to by Hamas over eight months ago, on May 6, 2024, which Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, then refused to accept.

This suggests that, despite their protestations, neither Biden nor the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who also rushed to take credit for the deal, had actually done much at all in the intervening eight months, except to be publicly humiliated by Netanyahu, while continuing to send an extraordinary amount of deadly weapons to Israel, indicating that they were prepared to accept humiliation because they continued to unconditionally support Israel’s apparently never-ending hunger for Palestinians’ blood.

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.

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 Thursday April 26, in Amsterdam, Ali al-Marri, one of only three men held and tortured as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, spoke for the first time publicly, since his release in 2015, about his long ordeal in US custody, and launched a report about his imprisonment as an “enemy combatant,” implicating several FBI agents and stating that he is an innocent man, who only pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorism in May 2009 because he could see no other way to be released and reunited with his family in Qatar.

Primarily through a case analysis of 35,000 pages of official US documents, secured through Freedom of Information legislation, al-Marri, supported by the British NGO CAGE and his long-standing US lawyer, Andy Savage, accuses several named FBI agents, and other US government representatives, of specific involvement in his torture. The generally-accepted narrative regarding US torture post-9/11 is that it was undertaken by the CIA (and, at Guantánamo, largely by military contractors), while the FBI refused to be engaged in it. Al-Marri, however, alleges that FBI agents Ali Soufan and Nicholas Zambeck, Department of Defense interrogator Lt. Col. Jose Ramos, someone called Russell Lawson, regarded as having had “a senior role in managing [his] torture,” and two others, Jacqualine McGuire and I. Kalous, were implicated in his torture.

Al-Marri’s story is well-known to those who have studied closely the US’s various aberrations from the norms of detention and prisoner treatment in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — at Guantánamo, in CIA-run “black sites,” in proxy prisons run by other governments’ security services, and, for al-Marri, and the US citizens Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi, on US soil — but it is a sad truth that the majority of Americans have not heard of him. Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote the following article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012 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.

On Saturday, at the White House, President Obama announced that, in exchange for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan, held for five years by the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani Network, he had released five Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo to Qatar.

Although the announcement was initially greeted positively, the president was soon under pressure from critics claiming that the five men were “battle-hardened Taliban commanders,” as the Washington Post put it, whose release posed a threat to America’s national security.

Some of the critical voices also claimed that Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter who should have been abandoned, and others chided President Obama for failing to notify Congress 30 days before the release of prisoners from Guantánamo, as required by the National Defense Authorization Act. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear friends and supporters,

If you have a few minutes to spare, I hope you’ll read “What We Should Really Be Talking About With the Bowe Bergdahl Controversy,” my first article for PolicyMic, looking at how the largely cynical attacks on President Obama for his prisoner swap at the weekend (in which five Taliban prisoners at Guantánamo were released in Qatar in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sole US prisoner of war in Afghanistan) is obscuring the plight of the men still held at Guantánamo — and, specifically, the 78 men (out of 149 in total) who have been cleared for release.

All but three of these men were cleared for release in January 2010 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama established shortly after taking office in 2009. The three others were cleared for release in recent months by Periodic Review Boards, and yet all are still held, because, in Guantánamo’s disgusting, topsy-turvy world, in which the administration, Congress and the judiciary have all, in various ways, failed the prisoners, it is, in many ways, easier to be released from Guantánamo if you are regarded as somehow “significant,” than if you are palpably insignificant and cleared for release. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last three months, much discussion has focused on the possibility that, as part of negotiations aimed at securing peace in Afghanistan, the US would release five high-level Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo. Almost entirely forgotten are 12 other Afghan prisoners at Guantánamo, who are mostly so insignificant that they have no one to lobby for them, and are being rather disgracefully overlooked.

The first information about discussions regarding the release of prisoners emerged in a Reuters article on December 19 last year, which explained how secret negotiations between the US government and the Taliban had begun ten months earlier. As part of “the accelerating, high-stakes diplomacy,” Reuters explained, the US was “considering the transfer of an unspecified number of Taliban prisoners from the Guantánamo Bay military prison into Afghan government custody.”

The day after, at a UN Security Council debate on Afghanistan, the Afghan deputy foreign minister Jawed Ludin “stressed the government’s determination to pursue reconciliation efforts despite Taliban attacks and assassinations,” as AFP described it. “We believe the process may benefit from the establishment of an office, within or outside Afghanistan, whereby formal talks between relevant Afghan authorities and representatives of armed opposition, including the Taliban, could be facilitated,” Ludin told the council, and AFP noted that Afghan authorities had “put forward Saudi Arabia or Turkey as the best places to set up a Taliban liaison office abroad to enable peace talks to end the devastating 10-year insurgency.” Read the rest of this entry »