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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.

Two months ago, in an article about how former Guantánamo prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi was being prevented from having a passport, two and a half years after he was freed from Guantánamo, despite being promised that it would be returned after two years, I wrote about the scandal of how everyone released from the prison “will continue to be branded as ‘enemy combatants’ for the rest of their lives — unless, eventually, concerted action is taken by those who respect the law to hold the US to account.” As I also put it, “The status of the ‘un-people’ of Guantánamo is a peculiarly aberrant post-9/11 creation, and one that cannot be allowed to stand forever.”

I also explained that, although it is reasonable to assume that all kinds of deals were made between the US government and the prisoners’ home governments, details of these deals have never been made public — and even if they were, of course, we shouldn’t forget that whatever deals were arranged have absolutely no basis in international law.

I had reason to think yet again about this enduring injustice just last week, when the National Post, in Canada, published an article by reporter Tom Blackwell looking at the case of former Guantánamo prisoner Ayub Mohammed, a Uighur, part of an oppressed Turkic minority from north western China, also known as the Uyghurs.

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 and related issues over the first 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 the morning of March 7, Donald Trump tweeted an outrageous lie about Guantánamo — “122 vicious prisoners, released by the Obama Administration from Gitmo, have returned to the battlefield. Just another terrible decision!”

That number, 122, was taken from a two-page “Summary of the Reengagement of Detainees Formerly Held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,” issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in July 2016. The summaries are issued twice a year, and, crucially, what Trump neglected to mention is that 113 of the 122 men referred to in that summary were released under President Bush, and just nine were released under President Obama. In the latest ODNI summary, just released, the total has been reduced to 121, with just eight men released under President Obama.

This is a disgraceful lie to be circulated by the President of the United States, and it is depressing to note that it was liked by over 85,000 Twitter users, and that Trump apparently has no intention of withdrawing it. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago, I wrote an article entitled, “As Judges Kill Off Habeas Corpus for the Guantánamo Prisoners, Will the Supreme Court Act?” in which I covered the latest grim news from the US courts regarding the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions (see “Guantánamo Habeas Results: The Definitive List” for more).

As I explained in that article, and in a series of articles over the last year and a half, the promise that habeas corpus held for the prisoners in June 2008, when the Supreme Court granted them constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights, in Boumediene v. Bush, has, since July 2010, been killed off by judges in the D.C. Circuit Court, led by Senior Judge A. Raymond Randolph, a right-wing ideologue notorious for endorsing every piece of legislation relating to the Guantánamo prisoners that, under George W. Bush, was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.

The case that first shut down habeas corpus was Adahi v. Obama, involving a Yemeni, Mohammed al-Adahi, whose habeas corpus petition was granted in August 2009, on the correct basis that, although al-Adahi had accompanied his sister to Afghanistan for her marriage to a man with purported connections to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, he himself had no connection to either group, and was just a chaperone. Read the rest of this entry »

Before WikiLeaks unleashed a trove of classified military assessments from Guantánamo, revealing — to discerning eyes — how the entire edifice was buit on the lies extracted through the torture, coercion or bribery of the prisoners, and before Osama bin Laden was conveniently killed a week later, perhaps to divert attention back to the torture on which modern-day America is built, and the lies and the arbitrary detention of Muslims, which, to some dark and powerful forces at work in the United States, must not apparently be questioned, the prison at Guantánamo — the most visible icon of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” inherited and maintained by Barack Obama, despite his early enthusiasm for closing it — marked a particularly dark day in its miserable history.

On April 18, the Supreme Court, which had ruled twice that the prisoners at Guantánamo had habeas corpus rights, refused to consider the case of five men abandoned in the prison, despite being innocent.

These men — five Uighurs — are known to people who have been paying attention to what has been done in their name at Guantánamo, but are unknown to many others, even though their plight is emblematic of how cruel and paranoid America is in the 21st century. Read the rest of this entry »