A Mockery of Justice: Torture Victim to Face Trial at Guantánamo After 25 Years
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In the long, dark farce of Guantánamo’s military commissions, the recently announced and almost entirely ignored decision by the Pentagon to turn down a plea deal for Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, a prominent CIA torture victim and the alleged architect of the Al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in October 2000, and to proceed, instead, with an unwinnable trial, is just the latest manifestation of a refusal by successive US administrations to reckon with the corrosive effects of the use of torture.
With this decision, the Trump administration has now embraced a sickening and enduring bi-partisan consensus that, when it comes to those accused of the gravest crimes at Guantánamo — including the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 — it is preferable to cling to an unworkable belief in vengeance, through a fantastical belief in successful prosecutions that involve the death penalty, than to admit that the use of torture on the defendants has thoroughly undermined that possibility.
The reality, which every administration has denied — from Bush to Obama, and from Biden to Trump — is that torture, undertaken over many years in the CIA’s global network of “black site” torture prisons, is so fundamentally incompatible with justice that the only viable way forward is to agree to plea deals that take the death penalty off the table in exchange for lifelong imprisonment at Guantánamo and full and frank confessions that bring some measure of “closure.”
Israel, the US, the UK and Germany Have Destroyed Human Rights
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Yesterday, December 10, was Human Rights Day, marking the anniversary of the proclamation and adoption by the United Nations, on December 10, 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a hugely commendable and aspirational template for a better world, in which, to quote from its Preamble, “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family” were recognized as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
Translated into 577 languages, from Abkhaz to Zulu, the UDHR is, as the UN explains, “the most translated document in the world”, and is “generally agreed to be the foundation of international human rights law”, having “inspired a rich body of legally binding international human rights treaties.”
These include, as I discussed in an article year ago, entitled, Is Hope Still Alive on the Anniversaries of the Genocide and Torture Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (more generally known as the Torture Convention), which was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1984, the 36th anniversary of the UDHR, expanding on Article 5 of the Declaration, which states, unequivocally, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
Did a Leak Stop Trump From Sending 9,000 Migrants to Guantánamo, Including 800 Europeans?
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Yesterday, marking UN Torture Day, I posted my latest article on Close Guantánamo, which I’m cross-posting here, with reflections on torture past and present at the prison, Donald Trump’s shameful and lawless decision to co-opt Guantánamo for his deeply racist “war on migrants” — and the latest news involving Haitian migrants. I also publicized a recent letter to Kristi Noem and Pete Hegseth calling for the closure of Guantánamo by Rep. Rashida Tlaib and 14 of her Congressional colleagues, which was, in particular, prompted by alarming reports two weeks ago that the Trump administration was intending to send 9,000 new migrants to Guantanamo, including 800 Europeans. The story was decried as “fake news” by the White House, but I suggested that it was in fact a plan, and that it was leaked by officials within the administration to get it dropped, which seems to have quietly happened after numerous foreign governments expressed outrage about the proposals.
Yesterday, June 26, was the UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, first marked in 1998 to commemorate the historic day in 1987 when the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment came into effect, and also to mark the historic day in 1945 when the United Nations Charter, the founding document of the UN, was signed in San Francisco by 50 countries.
Despite the best intentions of those who worked assiduously to create the Torture Convention over many decades, many of its signatories have — either openly or covertly — failed to fulfill their obligations to prevent the use of torture.
Particularly prominent amongst the violators of the Torture Convention is the United States, which, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, outsourced torture to a number of notorious right-abusing regimes in the Middle East, and also implemented a covert global torture program via a number of CIA “black site” torture prisons scattered around the world. I covered much of this story as the lead writer of a UN report about secret detention in 2010, and the CIA’s role was scrutinized and condemned in a torture report undertaken by the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose 500-page unclassified summary was published in December 2014.
Is Hope Still Alive on the Anniversaries of the Genocide and Torture Conventions, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
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For anyone concerned with human rights and international humanitarian law, two dates in 1948 — December 9 and December 10 — are of crucial importance, as these are the dates when the recently-formed United Nations, via its General Assembly, idealistically and optimistically adopted, on December 9, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention), and, the day after, adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which established, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected, and which, as the UN explains, “inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties.” Ever since, December 10 — today — has been known and celebrated as Human Rights Day, while December 9 is marked as the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime.
One of those subsequent treaties is the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the Torture Convention), which, after decades of wrangling, was finally adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1984, the 36th anniversary of the UDHR, expanding on Article 5 of the Declaration, which states, unequivocally, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
The Genocide Convention, and the long quest for accountability
The Genocide Convention, drawing on the work of the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term during the Second World War, defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” — “killing members of the group”, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”, and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Military Judge at Guantánamo Restores 9/11 Plea Deals, Rules Lloyd Austin Had No Right to Withdraw Them Three Months Ago
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On July 31 this year, a truly historic event took place at Guantánamo — in the military commissions, the trial system established to prosecute prisoners charged with acts of terrorism.
After two and a half years of negotiations between three of the men charged in connection with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, their prosecutors and their defense teams, the Convening Authority for the Commissions, retired US Army Brigadier General Susan K. Escallier (who was previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals), entered into three separate pretrial agreements (PTAs) with Khalid Shaykh Mohammad (KSM), the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, and two of his alleged accomplices, Walid bin Attash, and Mustafa Al-Hawsawi. Of the five men originally charged in connection with the 9/11 attacks, one other man, Ammar al-Baluchi, is still involved in negotiations regarding his case, while the fifth, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was ruled “unfit to stand trial” by a DoD Sanity Board last year.
Two days after the plea deals were announced, however, they were rescinded by the defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, in a decision that, shamefully, demonstrated a commitment to undying vengeance in defiance of reality on the government’s part, coupled with fear of even greater reality-defying vengefulness from Republicans.
UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians
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Three weeks ago, on October 10, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel issued a hugely significant report about Israel’s “war on hospitals” in the Gaza Strip over the last year, and its treatment of Palestinians in its accountable prison system, where torture, rape and murder are all widespread.
I wrote about the “war on hospitals” in a previous article, UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals, when I promised to follow up with a second article about the Commission’s findings regarding Israel’s prisons, and this article is my fulfilment of that promise.
When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, around 80% of the Palestinian population — 750,000 people — were ethnically cleansed from their homes in what is known as the Nakba (“catastrophe”), fleeing or being forcibly expelled as refugees into the West Bank (then controlled by Jordan), the Gaza Strip (then controlled by Egypt), Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. None of them — or their descendants — have ever been allowed to return.
Lloyd Austin Cynically Revokes 9/11 Plea Deals, Which Correctly Concluded That the Use of Torture Is Incompatible With the Pursuit of Justice
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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 depressing but sadly predictable news regarding the prison at Guantánamo Bay and its fundamentally broken military commission trial system, the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has stepped in to torpedo plea deal agreements with three of the men allegedly involved in planning and executing the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, which were announced just 48 hours before in a press release by his own department, the Department of Defense.
The three men in question are Khalid Shaikh Mohammad (KSM), the alleged mastermind of the attacks, Walid Bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and, although the full details of the plea deals were not made publicly available, prosecutors who spoke about them after the DoD’s press release was issued confirmed that the three men had “agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy and murder charges in exchange for a life sentence rather than a death-penalty trial.”
The plea deals, approved by the Convening Authority for the military commissions, Army Brig. Gen. Susan Escallier, who was previously the Chief Judge in the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals, would finally have brought to an end the embarrassing and seemingly interminable efforts to prosecute the three men, which began sixteen and a half years ago, and have provided nothing but humiliation for four successive US administrations — those led by George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Radio: I Discuss the Death of the Tories, Labour’s Dubious Victory and Israel’s Guantánamo with Chris Cook on Gorilla Radio
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Many thanks to my truth warrior colleague Chris Cook, in western Canada, for having me on his Gorilla Radio show again to discuss last week’s General Election in the UK, following up on my article, Despite the Landslide, Labour Have No Vision and Only Won the UK General Election Because the Tories Lost So Spectacularly.
Our interview, available on Chris’s Substack here, took place in the second half of the one-hour show, following his interview with journalist and author John Helmer about Russia and Ukraine.
Chris and I spent most of our half-hour interview discussing the collapse of the Conservative Party — who lost two-thirds of their seats — after the 14 unbearably long years of their increasingly deranged rule, which became noticeably more septic after the vote to leave the EU in 2016, and also discussing the largely empty promise of their replacements, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer, who, because of the vagaries of Britain’s antiquated and anachronistic ‘First Past the Post’ voting system, won a landslide victory, despite securing less votes than Jeremy Corbyn did as Labour’s leader in the General Elections of 2017 and 2019.
Held for 900 Days Since Being Approved for Release from Guantánamo: Sanad Al-Kazimi, a Yemeni Torture Victim
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Today marks 900 days since Sanad al-Kazimi, a 54-year old Yemeni, and a father of four, was unanimously approved for release from Guantánamo by a Periodic Review Board, a high-level US government review process established under President Obama.
This article, telling his story, is the ninth in an ongoing series of ten articles, published since early February, telling the stories of the 16 men (out of 30 still held at Guantánamo in total) who have long been approved for release. The articles are published alternately here and on the Close Guantánamo website, with their publication tied into significant dates in their long ordeal.
While most of the 779 men held at Guantánamo since it opened over 22 years ago were picked up — or bought — in Afghanistan or Pakistan and processed through military prisons in Afghanistan before their arrival at Guantánamo (mostly between December 2001 and November 2003), al-Kazimi was one of around 40 prisoners whose arrival at Guantánamo involved a more circuitous route, through the network of CIA “black sites” established and run in other countries between March 2002 and September 2006, and, in some cases, in proxy prisons in other countries run on behalf of the CIA.
Video: Guantánamo at 22 – Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin and Andy Worthington at New America
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On January 11, the 22nd anniversary of the opening of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, I was delighted to take part in an online panel discussion, “Guantánamo at Twenty-Two: What is the Future of the Prison Camp?”, hosted by New America, the US think-tank located close to the White House in Washington, D.C.
I’ve been taking part in annual panel discussions about Guantánamo at New America since 2011, normally with Tom Wilner, the US attorney with whom I co-founded the Close Guantánamo campaign in 2012, but this year Tom wasn’t available, and I was pleased that my suggestions for two compelling replacements — former prisoner Mohamedou Ould Slahi, the author of the best-selling Guantánamo Diary, and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism — were met with enthusiasm.
The moderator was Peter Bergen, New America’s Vice President, and the video, via YouTube, is posted below. It was a powerful event, and I hope that you have time to watch it, and that you’ll share it if you find it useful.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
