On Friday, I was delighted to be asked by Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio to discuss the ongoing shame of a world in which the prison at Guantánamo continues to remain open for business. The springboard for our interview was last week’s plea deal in the trial by military commission of Majid Khan, a Pakistani and former US resident, who was held for three and a half years in secret CIA prisons, where he was subjected to torture, after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, and has been held in Guantánamo, with 13 other supposed “high-value detainees,” since September 2006. His plea deal is noteworthy because it indicates that Khan will be a witness in the trials of other, much more significant figures than himself — specifically, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the supposed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

The interview is here, but in the end Scott and I spent most of our 18-minute interview discussing my visit to Kuwait, and also the detention situation in Afghanistan. I was very glad that Scott had asked me about my visit to Kuwait, as it had been such a great insight into the background of the two remaining Kuwaiti prisoners, Fayiz al-Kandari and Fawzi al-Odah, and the context of their capture.

I wrote about that visit here and here –and videos of a TV show I took part in with the attorney Tom Wilner are here — and Scott provided me with a great opportunity to discuss the exaggerated fears about releasing prisoners, and the outstanding problems for the majority of the men still held — the fact that the US government continues to rely on fundamentally unreliable evidence (the man who claimed that Fayiz was a spiritual advisor to Osama bin Laden, for example, was the most notorious liar in Guantánamo), and the fact that, even if people had been in Afghanistan as foot soldiers for the Taliban, that is not the same thing as being involved in international terrorism. Moreover, in the cases of Fayiz and Fawzi, although both men lost their habeas corpus petitions, nothing resembling proof was actually provided to demonstrate that they had ever been involved in any anti-American activities. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, just after the arraignment at Guantánamo of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which I discussed in my article, Trial at Guantánamo: What Shall We Do With The Torture Victim?, I was delighted to speak about al-Nashiri’s case — and about the dispiriting history of the Military Commissions at Guantánamo — with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio. The show is available here, and at the start of the interview, Scott asked me to explain how it is that the prison is still open, despite President Obama promising to close it within a year of taking office.

For the 171 men held, as I explained, the situation is bleak as we approach the 10th anniversary of the prison’s opening (in January 2012), as there now appears to be no way that any of them will ever leave the prison, given the indifference of the administration to their fate, and the hostility of lawmakers and certain crucial right-wing judges (who have been deciding detention policy in the D.C. Circuit Court). I also spoke about the current horror of the National Defense Authorization Act, which is being discussed in Congress, and which contains a vile proposal from lawmakers, insisting that, in future, all terror suspects be held in mandatory military custody, and not held as criminal suspects or given federal court trials.

As mentioned above, Scott and I also discussed the history of the Military Commissions and the six men who have been convicted or have accepted plea deals (David Hicks, Salim Hamdan, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, Ibrahim al-Qosi, Omar Khadr and Noor Uthman Muhammed), and this provided me with an opportunity to mention that Omar Khadr is still being held, even though he was supposed to return to Canada two weeks ago, according to the the terms of his plea deal. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I was delighted to speak to Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio, in what was our 29th interview (available here) since he first sought me out over four years ago, but our first interview since June this year. Scott particularly wanted to discuss “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo,” the harrowing documentary about Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen and former child prisoner, which is based on footage of his interrogations by Canadian intelligence agents in the summer of 2003, when he was just 16 years old.

I attended a Q&A session after a London screening of this film back in June, and also took part in a discussion about it on Press TV (available in two parts here and here), so I was pleased to be able to revisit it, especially as the story of Omar Khadr is so central to the injustices of Guantanamo, and also because, barring any last-minute horrors on the part of the Obama administration, he is due to be released from Guantanamo to Canada on October 31.

Khadr was only 15 when he was seized in July 2002, after a firefight in which he allegedly threw a grenade that killed a US soldier — although serious doubts have been expressed about whether he actually threw the grenade, as he was apparently unconscious, face down, and half-buried under rubble at the time, and his lawyers claimed that the initial reports of the firefight were amended afterwards to incriminate him. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I spoke for the 28th time to Scott Horton, who has had me on his Antiwar Radio show on a refreshingly regular basis over the last few years to vent my spleen at the continuing abomination that is Guantánamo, Obama’s failure to close it, and the disgraceful behaviour of other parties — opportunistic, fearmongering Republicans, cowardly Democrats, deranged judges and the now spineless Supreme Court — who have also failed to bring the Guantánamo years to an end, and to return America to the rule of law that existed before the 9/11 attacks.

The 32-minute show is available here, and this time around Scott not only publicised my recent fundraising appeal, which is ongoing, as I still have $400 to raise to reach my quarterly target of $2000, but also asked me to discuss the latest dismal news about Barack Obama, the President who failed. The specific spur for the show — as well as my fundraising appeal — was my recently completed five-part series, “WikiLeaks and the Unknown Prisoners of Guantánamo,” in which I told the stories of 84 of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo that had never been told before. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in January 2010, law professor and Harper’s columnist Scott Horton had a fascinating and alarming article published in Harper’s Magazine (it was online in January, and in the March print edition), entitled, “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides’: A Camp Delta Sergeant Blows the Whistle,” a devastating analysis of three supposed suicides at Guantánamo on the night of June 9, 2006. The official report into the deaths had been previously condemned by researchers at the Seton Hall Law School, who had concluded that it contained more holes than verifiable content, but Horton’s exposé ratcheted up the interest, as it drew on the testimony of a number of military personnel who were not only present on the night in question, but were manning the watch towers, which, of course, provide a unique overview of life in Guantánamo and the coming and going of prisoners and military personnel.

I won’t run through the whole article here — and its suggestion that the men were killed, either by accident or design, and probably during torture sessions in “Camp No,” a separate facility outside the main perimeter fence — as I recommend anyone who has not read it to do so (and also to read my own commentary on it, and my follow-up here), but I will say that, having spoken to the lead soldier responsible for questioning the official story, Staff Sgt. Joe Hickman, I was convinced that he had no reason to fabricate a story that could only damage his career, and was particularly impressed by the description of how “he could not forget what he had seen at Guantánamo. When Barack Obama became president, [he] decided to act. ‘I thought that with a new administration and new ideas I could actually come forward,’ he said. ‘It was haunting me.’” And as he told me last year, he felt “physically sick” after holding onto his story for three years. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago, I spoke, for the 27th time, to the irrepressible Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio, in response to the ongoing — and false — narrative propagated in the US by torture apologists including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, which has arisen, like a malignant phoenix, in response to the death of Osama bin Laden. The 22-minute show is available here (and here as an MP3).

In this false narrative, in which an assassination that should mark an end to the “War on Terror” is being manipulated by dark forces to suggest the start of a new phase in the “war,” Guantánamo and secret prisons — and, by inference at least, torture — are undergoing what is intended to be a rehabilitation process, proving Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their lawyers correct, when, in fact, they are all responsible for breaking the US torture statute.

The spur for this has been a deliberately mangled narrative, involving information that led to bin Laden’s capture, as I explained in my article, Osama bin Laden’s Death, and the Unjustifiable Defense of Torture and Guantánamo (and also see, New York Times Attempts to Stifle Torture Debate It Helped Spark in the Wake of Osama bin Laden’s Death). In addition, some supporters of Guantánamo and torture — in Congress, sadly — hope to keep Guantánamo open to hold terror suspects captured in future, and also want to expand the “War on Terror,” as I explained in my article, No End to the “War on Terror,” No End to Guantánamo. Read the rest of this entry »