Last Thursday, a powerful and historically significant event took place in London, when an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ artwork was launched at Rich Mix, a cultural and community space at 35-47 Bethnal Green Road in Shoreditch, London E1 6LA. The exhibition was supported by the UK Guantánamo Network (an umbrella group of organizations calling for Guantánamo’s closure), in collaboration with Amnesty International UK, and was curated by Lise Rossi and Dominique O’Neil, core team members of the UK Guantánamo Network, and Amnesty International members.
The exhibition, “Don’t Forget Us Here”, named after the compelling 2021 memoir of former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, runs until January 5, and the launch was, genuinely, historically significant because it is the first exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ artwork in the UK, and because Mansoor himself attended, and gave a profoundly moving speech about the significance of art for the men held at Guantánamo.
If we lived in a world that cared about the continued existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the power of artwork to break through the sweeping isolation and dehumanization to which the men held there were subjected throughout the seven years that they were held under George W. Bush, until an easing of conditions under President Biden allowed “compliant” prisoners to take classes, including art classes, on a communal basis, Mansoor would have been featured on mainstream news channels, but, shamefully the world doesn’t care.
Since the prison at Guantánamo Bay opened nearly 23 years ago, holding Muslim men (and boys) for the most part indefinitely without charge or trial, most of the western mainstream media — and particular the US media — turned a blind eye to the dehumanization and brutalization of Muslims held there, and also held elsewhere in the US’s global network of “war on terror” prisons.
They also stayed largely silent as the west’s ruinous warmongering policies in Muslim countries created a global wave of refugees in 2015, which, in turn, exacerbated anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiment to such an extent that the UK left the EU via Brexit, Donald Trump was elected in the US, and racism and Islamophobia are now so deeply entrenched that western governments, and most of the western media, have failed to recognize Israel’s relentless 14-month long assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide, even though, if it involved anyone but Muslims, they would have fallen over themselves to condemn it.
In this fundamentally racist media landscape, the only news channel that was present at the launch was the Turkish news channel TRT World. They interviewed Mansoor and produced the short feature below, which included footage from the launch. I hope that you have time to watch it, but I also hope that further footage eventually surfaces — perhaps of my introductory speech, providing a summary of the situation at Guantánamo now, of the urgent need for 16 men approved for release (including two artists) to be freed before President Biden leaves office, but especially of Mansoor’s charming, eloquent and heartfelt discussion of the meaning of the art.
For anyone wanting to know more, I urge you, if you haven’t done so already, to read Mansoor’s memoir, which contains a truly inspiring chapter on the liberating effects of creativity on the men deprived of free expression for so long.
One of these men is Moath al-Alwi, the only one of the six artists whose work is featured in the exhibition who is still held, even though he was unanimously approved for release by a high-level US government review process nearly three years ago. Moath’s speciality is making three-dimensional sculptures of sailing ships, which he creates, with extraordinary inventiveness, using recycled materials. As Mansoor explains in his memoir, “Moath could make anything once he set his mind to it.”
On display as part of the exhibition is a beautiful video of Moath’s ship-building techniques, made many years ago for the New York Times, and now available on the video creators’ YouTube channel, and posted below. It features an actor speaking Moath’s own words, and vividly brings to life his inventiveness.
This period in Guantánamo’s long history, when creativity was tolerated, or even encouraged, is referred to by Mansoor, in his memoir, as “the golden age”, and the following passage demonstrates wonderfully how Moath was able to liberate not only himself, but also his fellow prisoners, and even some of the guards, through his three-dimensional creations.
We were at the peak of the golden age when Moath made his own windows. One opened east to Makkah and the sun rising over a vast blue sea dotted with ships and palm trees swaying gently in the morning light. The other window opened west to the most beautiful sunset, palm trees so close you could touch them, birds flying freely, and the sea a deep and mysterious blue. People came from all over to enjoy those windows and his other work. No one was jealous, except maybe some of the guards. The camp admin didn’t know how to feel about them.
While the other five artists — Sabri Al-Qurashi, Muhammad Ansi, Ahmed Rabbani, Abdualmalik Abud (aka Abd Almalik) and Mansoor himself — have been released from Guantánamo, it would be unwise to conclude that their release has, necessarily, meant freedom. This is because many prisoners released from Guantánamo, and, in particular, many of those resettled in third countries because it was regarded as unsafe for them to be sent home, continue to suffer from the stigma of having been held at Guantánamo — regarded with suspicion, denied travel documents, unable to work, and prevented from being reunited with their families, to name just a few examples of the ways in which they remain marginalized and without fundamental rights — even though they were never charged with a crime.
As I explained when I posted an article about the art exhibition a few weeks ago, “For the men released from Guantánamo, life has not necessarily improved. While Mansoor, released in Serbia in 2016, has, in recent years, finally been allowed to travel freely, and Abd Almalik lives in Montenegro, and has a website making his artwork available to interested parties, Sabri Al-Qurashi, released in Kazakhstan in 2014, lives fundamentally without any basic rights, and Muhammad Ansi, resettled in Oman in 2017, was, recently, forcibly repatriated to his home country of Yemen, where his status in unknown. Ahmed Rabbani, meanwhile, who was returned to his home country of Pakistan in February 2023, has found no support on his return, and recently suffered the loss of his brother, Abdul Rahim, also held with him in Guantánamo, and, previously, in CIA ‘black sites’, because of this lack of care.”
One other artist, not featured in the exhibition, also deserves mention, as he is also still held at Guantánamo, despite having been unanimously approved for release in July 2022. Khaled Qassim (aka Khalid Qassim, or Khalid Qasim), celebrated by Mansoor as a kind and caring person, a cellblock leader, a singer, a poet and a footballer, made sculptural paintings using the fabric of Guantánamo itself — the gravel on the ground — mixed with glue and then painted, as well as heavily lacquered allegorical paintings, and, along with Moath, the quality of his work is worthy of international attention.
As for the exhibition itself, its opening in the UK is in itself something of minor miracle. As Mansoor explains in his memoir, “the golden age” at Guantánamo didn’t last forever. Within just a few years, as the military leadership rotated and changed, another violent clampdown occurred, and by early 2013 the prisoners had embarked on a prison-wide hunger strike, which, after years of global media indifference, suddenly reawakened them to the prison’s ongoing existence, and finally prompted Obama to resume the release of prisoners, which had largely ground to a halt after Republicans had raised repeated obstacles to delay or prevent the ability of the administration to free anyone.
Despite this renewed clampdown, during the period when a certain openness held sway, the prisoners had been allowed to give their art to their lawyers, and, via them, to their families, and, as a result, in October 2017, the very first exhibition of prisoners’ artwork — including some of Moath’s sailing ships — opened at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Versions of it have since taken place in other locations in the US, as well as in Berlin and the European Parliament, and, most recently, with Mansoor’s involvement, in Belgrade, although that first exhibition prompted a horrible backlash from the Pentagon that had a profound impact on the artists still held.
As I explained in my recent article, “the existing arrangements — in which prisoners were allowed to give their art to their lawyers, and, via them, to their families — were abruptly cancelled, and the Pentagon claimed ownership of all the men’s art, the right to destroy it, if they wished, and the right to prevent any prisoner from leaving the prison with any of the work they had created. Prisoners were also — at least in some cases — prevented or restricted from making any new artwork.”
As I proceeded to explain, “These various threats and bans stayed in place until February 2023, when, finally, in response to a submission by two UN Special Mandates holders — the Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, and the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism — they were lifted.”
The lifting of the ban allowed Ahmed Rabbani to return with his artwork to Pakistan, where he subsequently held an exhibition. However, although it must also have improved the mental health of Moath and Khaled, for both of whom art has become a part of themselves, it means nothing when they can still see no end to their imprisonment, because, as has been commonplace throughout Guantánamo’s history, despite them having been approved for release, they are still held by a captor — the US government — that has little or no interest in prioritizing the release of men it should never have held in the first place.
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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.
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I’m delighted to announce that, on Thursday December 5, an exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ artwork, “Don’t Forget Us Here”, named after the 2021 memoir of former prisoner Mansoor Adayfi, will be launching at Rich Mix, a cultural and community space in Shoreditch, at 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA.
The exhibition will be running until January 5, with an opening event, starting at 6pm on December 5, featuring Mansoor and myself as speakers. It was organized by the UK Guantánamo Network (an umbrella group of organizations calling for Guantánamo’s closure), in collaboration with Amnesty International UK, and was put together by Lise Rossi and Dominique O’Neil, core team members of the UK Guantánamo Network, and Amnesty International members.
The exhibition — the first in the UK — is a version of an exhibition of artwork by current and former prisoners that first opened at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City in October 2017, and that has since toured across the US, as well as in Berlin and the European Parliament.
I’m delighted to be flagging up an important exhibition of Guantánamo prisoners’ artwork that is currently on display at the Atrium-Gallery of the Institute of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt University of Berlin (Georgenstr. 47, 10117 Berlin).
The exhibition — of original artwork by one current prisoner, Moath al-Alwi, and three former prisoners, Sabri al-Qurashi, Mohammed al-Ansi and Ghalib al-Bihani, all Yemenis — is the first to take place outside the US, where several exhibitions have taken place since the ground-breaking “Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo” was presented at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York from October 2017 to January 2018. See here for my report about that exhibition, and see here and here for my reports from a subsequent exhibition held at CUNY School of Law in New York in 2020. Please also check out my articles here and here (and follow the internal links) for the full story of how, from November 2017 to February 2023, the US government imposed a ban on prisoners leaving with their artwork (and threatened to destroy it) in a fit of pique triggered by the John Jay College exhibition.
Moath al-Alwi, best known for his impressive sailing ships made out of recycled materials, was approved for release from Guantánamo over two years ago, on December 27, 2021, but, shamefully, is still held. Sabri al-Qurashi, meanwhile, was resettled in Kazakhstan in 2014, but promises that he would helped to rebuild his life have turned to ashes, as he explained to Elise Swain for an article for the Intercept a year ago.
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, as part of my concerted efforts to publicize the ongoing and unjustifiable existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay on the 21st anniversary of its opening, I was delighted to be asked by the indefatigable radio host Scott Horton to appear on his show, in an episode that he gave the appropriate heading, “The US is Still Running an Illegal Prison at Guantánamo Bay.”
Scott and I have been dissecting the iniquities of Guantánamo and the “war on terror” on a regular basis for over 15 years, and I’m impressed by his astonishing dedication to amplifying critical voices that are generally ignored by the mainstream media. This was his 5,831st interview, in a career as a radio host spanning 20 years, and he has somehow also found the time to write and publish two books about US militarism and the “war on terror” — “Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan,” and “Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism.”
As Scott explained in his introduction to the show on his website, where you can listen to our half-hour interview, and also download it as an MP3, “Andy Worthington returns to talk about the 35 men who remain imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay as we pass the 21st anniversary of the prison. Of those 35 men, 20 have already been cleared for release, yet they remain in custody with no release date. Scott and Worthington talk about the shameful history of the prison, consider all the reasons it’s stayed open so long and discuss what must happen for this disgraceful chapter of America’s history to finally be brought to an end.”
Over the last few months, I’ve been catching up on some stories I missed, about former Guantánamo prisoners seeking — and often struggling — to adjust to life in third countries, which took them in when the US government refused or was unable to repatriate them after they had been approved for release by high-level US government review processes.
Since 2006, dozens of countries have offered new homes to Guantánamo prisoners, and the examples I have looked at have mostly focused on men resettled in various European countries — see Life After Guantánamo: Yemeni Released in Serbia Struggles to Cope with Loneliness and Harassment (about Mansoor al-Dayfi, released in July 2016), Life After Guantánamo: Egyptian in Bosnia, Stranded in Legal Limbo, Seeks Clarification of His Rights (about Tariq al-Sawah, released in January 2016), and Life After Guantánamo: Yemeni Freed in Estonia Says, “Part of Me is Still at Guantánamo” (about Ahmed Abdul Qader, released in January 2015). In The Anguish of Hedi Hammami, A Tunisian Released from Guantánamo in 2010, But Persecuted in His Homeland, I also wrote about the difficulties faced by Hammami, a Tunisian first released in Georgia, who returned to his home country after the Arab Spring, only to find that he faces “a constant regimen of police surveillance.”
One day, I hope, all the men released from Guantánamo will have lawyers successfully negotiate an acceptable basis for their existence with the US government. As it currently stands, they are regarded as “illegal enemy combatants” or “unprivileged enemy belligerents,” even though almost all were never charged with any sort of crime, and their status, compared to every other human being on earth, remains frustratingly and unacceptably unclear. This is especially true, I believe, for those settled in third countries, as no internationally accepted rulebook exists to codify their rights, and the obligations of those taking them in. Read the rest of this entry »
On December 30, five men were released from Guantánamo, bringing to 28 the number of men released from the prison in 2014, and reducing the prison’s population to 127. The five men were approved for release in 2009 by the high-level, inter-agency Guantánamo Review Task Force that President Obama appointed shortly after taking office in January 2009, and three of them had previously been approved for release under President Bush.
The released prisoners — two Tunisians and three Yemenis — were not returned to their home countries, but were given new homes in Kazakhstan. As the New York Times described it, “Officials declined to disclose the security assurances reached between the United States and Kazakhstan,” but a senior Obama administration official stated that the five “are ‘free men’ for all intents and purposes after the transfer.”
The Obama administration is to be commended for its efforts, although, of the 127 men still held, 59 were also approved for release in 2009 by President Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, and there can be no rest for campaigners until these men are also freed. 52 of them are Yemenis, whose release was prohibited by President Obama and by Congress in 2010 after it was revealed that a failed airline bomb plot in December 2009 had been hatched in Yemen. Read the rest of this entry »
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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