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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.

In a recent op-ed for The Hill, Anthony Lake, national security adviser to President Clinton from 1993 to 1997, and Close Guantánamo co-founder Tom Wilner, who was counsel of record to Guantánamo detainees in the two Supreme Court cases establishing their right to habeas corpus and in the case establishing their right to legal counsel, made a powerful case for the closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which we’re pleased to be cross-posting below.

Thursday marked the end of the first 100 days of Joe Biden’s presidency, and while we’re aware that the new administration has had a huge workload to deal with after four ruinous years of the Trump presidency, and with the unprecedented challenge of dealing with Covid-19, it remains imperative that the scandal of the prison at Guantánamo is dealt with sooner rather than later, because its continued existence is an affront to all of the US’s cherished notions of itself as a country that respects the rule of law.

Using, as a springboard, the recent release of the movie “The Mauritanian,” which tells the story of former Guantánamo prisoner, torture victim and best-selling author Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Lake and Wilner run through the reasons why Guantánamo’s continued existence is so shameful and counter-productive — a hugely expensive offshore prison where the US “detains men indefinitely, without charge or trial or the basic protections of due process of law,” whose continued existence also damages US national security by inflaming tensions within the Muslim world.

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.

Eight months since Donald Trump became president, and 16 years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, one unfortunate side-effect of 9/11 — the prison at Guantánamo Bay — briefly flickered back into the national consciousness last week.

That faraway facility, where 41 men are still held, was supposed to have been closed by President Obama, but that was a promise he failed to keep, despite having eight years to do. And now Donald Trump — childishly, petulantly, as usual — wants to treat the prison as his own plaything, somewhere to keep open forever, and to send new people to, whom he regards as his version of what Bush administration officials so memorably — and disproportionately — referred to as “the worst of the worst.”

“The worst of the worst” never were held at Guantánamo, as Larry Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell explained to me in an interview in 2009. He told me, “I laughed at this when I first heard it, but now I realize it was probably closer to the truth than anything the administration said — when Bush announced in September 2006, with some degree of trepidation, that he’d transferred these 14 to Guantánamo out of the secret prisons. Now I realize that they made that transfer principally so they could get some hardcore terrorists to Guantánamo.” Read the rest of this entry »