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CNN is to be congratulated for recently publishing a detailed article about one of lingering injustices of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, involving the Uyghurs, a predominantly Turkic-speaking ethnic group from Xinjiang province, in the north west of China, whose cases I have reported on ever since I first began researching and writing about Guantánamo in 2006.

22 Uyghurs, captured crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001, ended up at Guantánamo, where the Bush administration, seeking cooperation from the Chinese authorities in the global “war on terror” that the US declared after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, obligingly designated the Uyghur prisoners as members of a largely non-existent terrorist organization, the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM).

This decision not only continues to blight the lives of the former Guantánamo prisoners, who were all resettled in third countries between 2006 and 2013, having been cleared of all wrongdoing by the US, but has also been used by the Chinese government to justify its ruthless imprisonment, since 2017, of at least a million Uyghurs in “re-education” camps, where credible allegations have been repeatedly made about how, as well as attempting to eradicate Uyghur culture, religion and identity through “re-education,” the camps also involve the forced sterilisation of Uyghur women, and the forced separation of children from their parents. There have also been numerous credible reports about Uyghur women being subjected to rape and torture.

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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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

Please sign and share a Change.org petition to the Canadian government calling for Ayub Mohammed, Salahidin Abdulahad and Khalil Mamut to be granted permanent residence status so that they can be reunited with their families.

In the long and shameful history of the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, where most of the 779 men held by the US military during the last eighteen and a half years were never charged or put on trial (as remains the case for the majority of the 40 men still held), the prevailing lawlessness and abuse do not necessarily end with a prisoner’s release.

Of the 729 men — and boys — released from Guantánamo since it opened (532 under George W. Bush, 196 under Barack Obama, and just one under Donald Trump), most have been sent back to their home countries, where, fundamentally, they have no protection from their home governments if, for example, their countries’ leaders decide that they should be imprisoned, or have their lives disrupted in any way, either sporadically, or even on a permanent basis.

For around 130 of these former prisoners, however, new homes had to be found for them in third countries — in most cases, because the US government accepted that it was unsafe for them to be returned to their home countries. In the cases of the majority of the Yemenis freed, for example, the US government regarded it as unsafe to repatriate them because of the security situation in Yemen, while in other cases — Syria, for example — the US accepted that the government could not be trusted to treat them humanely. This was also the case for 22 Uighurs — Turkic-speaking Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province — whose lives were in danger from the Chinese government.

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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.

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Thanks to the Atlantic, and Richard Bernstein, former foreign correspondent for Time and the New York Times, for revisiting the story of Guantánamo’s Uighurs, the ethnic group in the prison who were most transparently unconnected to the anti-American activities of Al-Qaeda.

The timing of Bernstein’s article, ‘When China Convinced the U.S. That Uighurs Were Waging Jihad,’ is evidently intended — and with good reason — to highlight the terrible situation faced by the UIghurs, a Turkic group from Xinjiang province in north western China, who are currently facing the harshest clampdown by the Chinese government in a long history of oppression, with at least a million Uighurs “arbitrarily detained in internment camps in Xinjiang, where they are forced to undergo political indoctrination,” as the Guardian explained in November 2018, after the United Nations’ Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (the first to study China since 2013) had condemned China for its deteriorating human rights record. As Vox explained, Western governments “had the harshest words for China,” with the US chargé d’affaires Mark Cassayre demanding that China “abolish all forms of arbitrary detention” for Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, and calling on the government to  “release the ‘possibly millions’ of individuals detained there.”

Bernstein’s article focuses on how the Bush administration — shamefully — reversed its opinion about the Chinese government’s oppression of the Uighurs in 2002, to justify its imprisonment of 22 Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, some of whom spent a total of 12 years in US custody, despite it having been obvious to anyone actually paying attention to their cases that, as many of the Uighurs themselves explained, they had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and had no animosity whatsoever towards the US.

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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. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

I wrote the following article, as “Guantánamo’s Lost Diaspora: How Donald Trump’s Closure of the Office Monitoring Ex-Prisoners Endangers U.S. National Security,” 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.

The presence of Donald Trump in the White House has been an unmitigated disaster for anyone concerned about the ongoing existence of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and any notion of justice regarding those held there, or, indeed, those freed from the prison over the years.

For Trump, the notion that there might be anything wrong — or un-American — about imprisoning people forever without any meaningful form of due process clearly doesn’t exist. Since he took office nearly two years ago, only one prisoner has been released, out of the 41 men still held at the prison when Obama took office; and that man, Ahmed al-Darbi, a Saudi, was only released, and transferred to ongoing imprisonment in Saudi Arabia, because of a plea deal he agreed to in his military commission trial proceedings back in 2014.

Trump, clearly, has no desire to meaningfully continue the parole-type process — the Periodic Review Boards — that Barack Obama initiated to release lower-level prisoners who could demonstrate that they didn’t pose a threat to the U.S. Indeed, his contempt for the process is such that he has shut down any possibility of the two men whose release was approved by Obama’s PRBs, but who didn’t get released before Obama left office, being freed by shutting down the State Department office that dealt with resettlements — the office of the Special Envoy for Guantánamo Closure. 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 »